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Top Intellectual Property Developments of 2018

Downloadable PDF of the full report.

Introduction to the 2018 Annual
Clancy Ratliff

In Memoriam: TyAnna Herrington
The rhetoric and composition community, and especially the close-knit group who studies copyright and intellectual property, experienced a sad loss in the summer of 2018: the passing of TyAnna Herrington, one of our leading lights. She was in the forefront of scholars who demonstrated the importance of copyright issues to rhetoric, composition studies, and technical communication. She was a kind and generous person who welcomed new scholars and teachers into our community and whose legacy will be remembered and treasured. Read on (full report).

Table of Contents

1 Introduction to the 2018 Annual
Clancy Ratliff

5 “Blockbuster Sermons” and Authorship Issues in Evangelicalism
T J Geiger

10 Plagiarizing a Pushcart Prize
Lanette Cadle

16 Sue for Mario Bros.: Nintendo vs. Emulation
Kyle D. Stedman

21 “Cockygate”: Trademark Trolling, Romance Novels, and Intellectual Property
Devon Fitzgerald Ralston

27 A (Zombie) Legislative Proposal with Implications for Fair Use and Remix Culture
Kim D. Gainer

33 Contributors

2019 Resolutions

The following resolutions were passed at the CCCC Annual Business Meeting held on Friday, March 15, 2019, in Pittsburgh.

Resolution 1

Whereas Vershawn Ashanti Young invited us to consider, theorize, and practice performance-rhetoric and performance-composition in a call for proposals that broke the rules, enacting performance in the very call to convene;

Whereas Dr. Vay’s own website performs the theorizing he calls us to by understanding and naming his in-person scholarly performances as appearances;

Whereas he has served in various capacities at the secondary and postsecondary level, and he has committed himself to consulting and training teachers to think about language and diversity and to have an awareness of interpersonal and intercultural communications;

Whereas he has challenged members of CCCC to include consideration of performance and communication in our work, moving beyond a focus on writing, and has instilled his passion for multidisciplinarity and inclusivity, cultivating a convention that has reflected how teaching and learning itself is interdisciplinary;

Whereas he blurs the boundaries of language, scholarship, and disciplines in his own work as an artist, scholar, teacher, and attorney; and

Whereas he models for all of us the importance of blending the personal and the professional, refusing to compartmentalize work and family, the academy and the real world;

BE IT THEREFORE RESOLVED that the 2019 Conference on College Composition and Communication thanks Vershawn Ashanti Young for his many contributions to us and to the profession.

Resolution 2

Whereas Brenda Whitney, in spite of the limited support generally afforded non-tenure-track faculty, and members of the Local Arrangements Committee have made significant contributions to support new attendees and returnees and to enhance the convention experience;

Whereas Brenda Whitney and the Local Arrangements Committee created a vibrant, inviting, and comprehensive guide to Pittsburgh that covered the various sections of this reinvigorated steel city and its local history;

Whereas they worked diligently to provide attendees with detailed information about opportunities for shopping, sightseeing, and attending cultural events in the Pittsburgh area, including attention to low-cost options;

Whereas they provided accessibility avenues so that almost every attendee of every ability was able to participate fully in the convention;

Whereas Local Arrangements Committee members were ever-present in the Convention Center helping to guide conference attendees to registration and events, making recommendations for nearby restaurants, and generally welcoming more than 3,000 visitors; and

Whereas Brenda Whitney and the Local Arrangements Committee somehow managed to provide seventy-degree weather in Pittsburgh in March, and created a welcoming Mr. Rogers’s Neighborhood feel for the convention;

BE IT THEREFORE RESOLVED that the 2019 Conference on College Composition and Communication expresses our deepest appreciation to Brenda Whitney and the Local Arrangements Committee by applauding their energy and efforts.

Resolution 3

WHEREAS CCCC has position statements articulating the importance of substantive arguments for faculty in tenure or promotion processes (e.g., community-based research/teaching/service; crediting the work of developing technologies as scholarly contributions; the policy on disability);

WHEREAS non-tenure-track (NTT) colleagues are engaged in many of the same practices, and face many of the same workplace climate issues (e.g., accessibility; bullying; harassment) as tenured/tenure-track faculty; and

WHEREAS the growing cadre of NTT faculty could benefit from organizational support arguing for contract renewals and promotions in much the same way that tenure-track faculty need support arguing for tenure and promotions;

BE IT THEREFORE RESOLVED that:

  1. CCCC works to include NTT representation on committees and task forces producing and revising position statements;
  2. CCCC revises current position statements that may facilitate renewal and/or promotion; and
  3. CCCC generates guidelines for ethical practices of renewal and promotion for NTT faculty.
Resolution 4

WHEREAS CCCC members approved a resolution in 2011 resolving that: (1) CCCC consults with the hotel workers union and other labor organizations to schedule meetings and conferences in hotels and convention halls with fair labor practices or contract with vendors that practice fair labor practices; and (2) CCCC commits to offering housing at convention rates in at least one hotel with fair labor practices at every meeting; and

WHEREAS CCCC has already established policies for responding to hostile legislation at convention locations, as well as protocols for respecting and responding to safety concerns on behalf of members, including strong consideration of moving or canceling the entire 2017 conference;

BE IT THEREFORE RESOLVED that:

  1. CCCC works with the Labor Caucus to update “CCCC Convention Siting and Hostile Legislation: Guiding Principles” to include language governing labor disputes; and
  2. CCCC agrees to encourage the Conference Chair, the NCTE staff, and the Local Arrangements Committee to work with the Labor Caucus to increase visibility and availability of labor-friendly local venues, including the provision of a labor-friendly lodging option at convention rates.

CCCC Wikipedia Initiative

CCCC is calling on its members to take part in our Wikipedia Initiative. As one of the five most visited websites in the world, Wikipedia has emerged within living memory as a key knowledge-broker and perception-shaper for readers and writers worldwide. Writing expert knowledge into Wikipedia is one important way we can address knowledge gaps, imbalances, and misinformation online.

Established in 2019, the CCCC Wikipedia Initiative proceeds from the conviction that it matters to edit Wikipedia, especially for academics committed to knowledge equity as a fundamental groundwork for social justice. CCCC Wikipedia Initiative is working to develop skills, cultivate inclusive community, and build structures of support and recognition for for past, present, and future CCCC members who recognize the importance of engaging with Wikipedia as a form of global public humanities scholarship.

Get Involved!

1) Register with the initiative so that we can track our impact as a community.
2) Sign up for an editing workshop or office hours meeting with the CCCC Wikipedian-in-Residence.
3) Join the CCCCWI-L for initiative announcements and discussion.
4) Join WikiProject Writing to organize and collaborate on Wikipedia.
5) Follow us on Twitter using the hashtag #CCCCWI.

The core goal of the CCCC Wikipedia Initiative is to foster the cultural shift, community building, and collaboration necessary for our profession to develop high-quality Wikipedia articles that expand the audiences of our research and scholarship to broad publics. To this end, we aim to:

  • Expand Wikipedia’s coverage of topics related to writing research and pedagogy to be comprehensive and current with major conversations in published scholarship;
  • Verify that article content is based on reliable secondary sources and represents disciplinary controversies and consensus with attention to issues of knowledge equity;
  • Revise and edit toward article quality measures for Good Article or Featured Article status.

Learn about the work of the CCCC Wikipedia Initiative Committee.

Get Support for Teaching with Wikipedia

Interested in teaching with Wikipedia? The Wiki Education Foundation offers training modules as well as editing/tech support for you and your students. Wikipedia-based writing and research assignments can be amazing opportunities to make student writing valuable beyond the classroom in both graduate and undergraduate courses. The information and ideas you teach deserve a global audience. Apply here.

Resources

Call for Program Proposals

Submit a Proposal

Proposals for the 2020 CCCC Annual Convention are due by 11:59 p.m. EDT on Monday, May 6, 2019.

Submit a Proposal

Criteria and Guidelines

General information

Program Format

Area Clusters

Information Required to Submit

Grants and Travel Awards

Considering Our Commonplaces

2020 CCCC Annual Convention
March 25-28, 2020
Milwaukee, Wisconsin

Program Chair: Julie Lindquist

Submit a Proposal for the 2020 CCCC Convention

Call for Proposals

Now is a good time to think about who we are and what we really value.

Just as it is at any other time.

Which is to say, now is a good time.

An ongoing priority of CCCC is the achievement of inclusivity—within the organization, within higher education, within our classrooms. As an organization whose business is the conduct of higher education, this should be our most persistently important goal, the ethical principle that is at the deep core of our decisions and actions. In fact, our history of conferences over the years is populated by calls for inclusivity, either as an explicit charge or as an implicit goal—which is to recognize inclusivity as both a focus of our ongoing attentions and as a persistent need that has demanded those attentions by affecting nearly every aspect of who we are as a community and what is possible for us to do: where we assemble, who we teach, how we grow knowledge even as we enact change.

It’s a good time to ask: what have we learned?

What inclusivity is (and means and takes) is a question that has motivated my life’s work as an educator. I am an unlikely product of higher education. The circumstances of my life have meant that I have always been positioned at an odd angle to the general project of education. I am a first-generation college graduate whose path to higher education (and especially, to the PhD) has been both improbable and fortuitous. I am a child of a single mother, raised by immigrant grandparents whose first language was not English. I left high school and got my first full-time job when I was 15; I began my postsecondary education at community college, where I learned that I would need a GED before transferring to the four-year institution close to home. It’s no surprise, I imagine, that I have never been able to settle comfortably into the usual narratives of opportunity, achievement, and mobility. The values that are at the heart of my work, and the directions my research has taken, are products of my experience of alienation from normative narratives of education. The fact of this formative (and persistent) dissonance continues to be the motivating force for my own work as a researcher and teacher–which is to say that it is a source of inspiration, action, ethical understanding, critique, and reflection.

If we take seriously our commitment to inclusivity and access, then we must be willing to return (and return again) to the question of how our most fundamental premises follow from this commitment. And: How are these premises expressed (or not) in our common practices? And: When are these practices enabling or disabling the goal of inclusivity?

I am also aware that I am not alone.

It’s a good time to ask: What might we learn?

Our struggles to attain disciplinary legitimacy have been ongoing. Our achievements have been hard-won. Whatever else it might be, a discipline, as a tradition of knowledge-making practices, is also an architecture of commonplaces. As tacit operating premises, commonplaces help us to see things by giving us permission to not see things. A healthy disciplinary practice is one of returning, over and over again, to the truths that are most deeply lodged in our collective imagination: for example, that “critical thinking” is an uncomplicated idea, a transparent virtue, and an irreproachable goal. That, when it comes to the game of writing assessment, some students must fail so that others may succeed. That teaching inclusively is (only) a matter of teaching “about” diversity, rather than a matter of creating storied learning experiences, or making good on the ones students have. That our primary activity is “teaching,” rather than creating learning opportunities for students. That “learning” is an experience that entails only gains, and never losses.

If the commonplaces of a given community (or culture) give us a way to understand what it believes and values, then they are also a way for us to see how it defines and defends its borders.

Nowhere is the tension between tradition and innovation more evident than in the very idea of commonplaces. It’s an idea that has had a long and troubled history in rhetoric, and it’s both the concept and the trouble that interest me, here. I think both can be productive for the purposes of naming and reflecting on what we believe and what we value. For Aristotle, commonplaces (topoi) named a store of common understandings, a set of shared cultural resources, by means of which rhetoricians could construct arguments. Later, the idea came to signify ideological means for exclusion from the most exclusive and privileged scenes of knowledge production. If the commonplaces of a given community (or culture) give us a way to understand what it believes and values, then they are also a way for us to see how it defines and defends its borders. For this reason, the idea may be a productive one precisely for what it affords in naming both what and who are present and absent in our knowledge-making community.

With my colleague and collaborator Bump Halbritter, I’ve spent the past decade thinking and writing about commonplaces. The two of us been motivated to do so by our experiences as researchers, which have taught us about the deep complexities of students’ lives in and out of school, and the adaptive strategies these lives produce. We have been motivated to do so by our experiences as teachers, which have allowed us to witness students in their encounters with educational routines and expectations. We have been motivated to do so by our work as WPAs, which has revealed to us not only that the commonplaces that most direct our work as practitioners are ours, and not those of others (students, colleagues in other disciplines, publics), but also, in our interactions with teachers, that commonplaces of teaching and students can often over-determine difficult human problems. Most of all, we have been motivated to so do by what we’ve learned from students’ stories, and how to listen to those stories and attend to their tellers. We have become increasingly convinced that there are some commonplaces which, even as they enable community practices, interfere with the potential for ethical innovation. It seems to us that these commonplaces often entail ideas about learners and learning—what learners do and need, how learning happens, and on what grounds learning may be refused.

With our reflection on each commonplace, we discover how much more we have yet to learn.

To observe that disciplinary commonplaces have become commonplace is, of course, a commonplace. What is less clear is what should follow from this observation. Commonplaces give us a common sense of purpose, and they organize thought and action. That’s the good news about commonplaces: in a chaotic world of busy routines, commonplaces are what help us understand our goals and values and manage the work of the everyday. Of course, that is also the bad news: often, the routines enabled by commonplaces become so deeply routinized as to be impervious to (or at least, unlikely subjects of) reflection. I think immediately here of our practices of assessment. In working with teachers, for example, I have learned how much the everyday pressures and routines of assessment control our sense of what is possible and necessary: assessments must come primarily from teachers, must be holistic (and copious!) in order to be responsible, must not fail to hold students accountable for all that is flawed or wrongheaded or undeveloped. As busy people, we as teachers need to work from a core of operating principles about what it means to assess students’ work in order to get the work done. And yet, these enabling principles, as they are commonly placed within the conditions of everyday life, may be the very things that make it hard to see what might go better.

There are two moments in particular when we may be inclined to reflect on the durability, application, and ethical mooring of our commonplaces: one, when things are going badly; and two, when things are going well.

Which is to say: Now is a good time.

We are in an ideal moment to reflect on our most durable beliefs and practices, as things are going both badly and well. I think we would likely agree that what is going badly is the current national scene, in which rancor, division, and mistrust prevail, and in which the purposes and conduct of education at all levels are being contested. Wisconsin, as it turns out, has been the scene of aggressively competing commonplaces about what education is and does and who it serves, and of new (not so new) debates about whether education is best conceived as a public good or a private commodity. The former governor of Wisconsin, for example, has worked assiduously to cut higher education budgets that fund programs in the humanities and in general education. Meanwhile, at the national level, our secretary of education has made moves toward the privatization of schools and the defunding of public ones.

What is going well, of course, is the strength and resolve of our organization as a countervailing force in national and local conversations about educational access, adult literacy, rhetorical ethics, and cultural and social diversity. We know that our work as members of CCCC has a renewed exigency and a new urgency.

I invite you to reflect, in this moment, on what purposes our commonplaces serve. To what extent are these purposes aligned with ethical and productive goals? In these politically turbulent times, how are our commonplaces serving us? How are they expressed in practice? Whose experiences are they recognizing and affirming? To whom are they giving access?

I invite you to reflect, in this moment, on what purposes our commonplaces serve. To what extent are these purposes aligned with ethical and productive goals? In these politically turbulent times, how are our commonplaces serving us? How are they expressed in practice? Whose experiences are they recognizing and affirming? To whom are they giving access? Our conference location for 2020, Milwaukee, our common place, is an auspicious location to consider and reconsider our educational mission and our theories of learning. Wisconsin is the site of a distinctive innovation in inclusive education, the Wisconsin Idea, which advanced the radical notion that state universities should serve the state, and that education should be accessible to all its residents. A more inclusive practice of higher education, the thinking went, should not be exclusively vocational, but should include an education in civic and humanistic ideals as well, and should make education available to all residents of the state via outreach and extension programs. In recent years, however, these ideas have been directly challenged, with significant consequences for the Wisconsin system and those it serves. We may ask: What commonplaces about access and inclusivity produced Wisconsin’s distinctive vision of education, and which ones have resulted in recent moves to change this vision? How are these sets of commonplaces alive in public discourses of education, and what do they predict for the future?

What can we learn in this moment, and in this place?

At this moment and in this place, I invite you to return to your own most durable beliefs and practices as an educator (in classrooms, as a researcher/writer, of publics?) and to ask yourself: When it comes to the work I do as an educator, what are my most sacred values? How do these values direct my practice? What do I believe to be true that I have always believed to be true? What did I once believe that I no longer believe to be true? If my beliefs and values have changed, what occasioned these changes? What are the human encounters, crises, and unlikely events that have compelled me into different relationships with my own truths? How has listening to the stories of diverse others motivated me to form a different relationship with my own experience, my own truths? From what experiences and locations do I draw my most actionable beliefs—values, principles, scholarship, experience, lore? How have my practices changed over time, given what I have always believed and no longer believe? What goals have I found most difficult to reach, and by what means might I identify difficulties in my practice in order to do so? How are my beliefs aligned with, and in opposition to, the educational institutions and communities in which I move? And, critically: What can I best learn from others? What can I only learn from others?

Ask yourself: What do I know, and how do I know it? What will it take for me to learn more, or learn differently?

This is important work for all (each) of us in considering our relationships with commonplaces.

I have often remarked that I never met a paradox I didn’t trust. The space occupied by this call is one of paradox, of the persistently tense relationship of tradition and innovation. Even as my mission here is invite us to question commonplaces, I don’t mean to suggest that I have not—that we should not—learn from the work of those who came before us, from traditions established as productive lines of inquiry. The invitation to reconsider commonplaces may be read to suggest that we are only interested in digging up our foundation of ideas and common practices. But it may just as well entail a dislodging rather than an upending, a nudging rather than an overturning. These motions, though they may seem small, may help us to discover new options for how we think about what we do (and new actions associated with this), rather than to abandon what is serving us, and (especially) those we serve, well. If we are to be an organization with an inclusive educational mission and a community, then we would be well advised to consider the foundational ideas we share and continue to ask whether these ideas are serving those we serve. Who are our students, what do they need, and why would they consent to learn what we hope to teach them?

In the spirit of this inquiry, we invite proposals for invitations to

  • Consider the cultural and disciplinary origins of (our) commonplaces.
  • Inquire into the capacity of commonplaces—about students, learning, technology, education—to direct our pedagogical practices.
  • Question how our commonplaces may have occluded more productive understandings of learners and learning.
  • Reflect on the public uses and value of our commonplaces.
  • Consider how commonplaces are products of traditions that have served, and continue to serve, us well.
  • Inquire into who is most sponsored, and who is most excluded, by our most sacred values and practices.
  • Question how our commitments to diversity, inclusion, and access may call for new understandings of our practices.
  • Reflect on how our commonplaces direct practices of research and representation.
  • Consider how our stories of learning may help us complicate durable commonplaces.
  • Inquire into the commonplaces of particular communities, and consider how these may function as assets for education.
  • Reflect on what we assume about the motives students may have for refusing our pedagogies.
  • Consider how our encounters with commonplaces in other disciplines may help us to become more aware of the possibilities and limitations of our own.
  • Inquire into our common beliefs about the nature and conduct of teaching and learning.
  • Question what we believe about the relationship of argument and persuasion to the conduct and effects of public discourse.
  • Reflect on relationships between disciplinary and public commonplaces about what it means to teach and learn.
  • Inquire into how the commonplaces of local institutions interface and interact with disciplinary commonplaces.
  • Question how the commonplaces that direct our how professional organizations and events—including CCCC—function, and whose interests they serve and do not serve.

In keeping with the goal of (re)imagining commonplaces of learning, we would do well to reflect on our understandings of what the CCCC event is and does as an educational experience for its participants, and to ask: How can the convention, as a common place, better serve its attendees as learners? How can we put our best practices as teachers and researchers in the service of this learning?

What if we questioned the commonplace that the convention is primarily a place to “present,” to deliver knowledge-products? What if we reimagined the convention as a common place of inquiry and learning?

In the spirit of returning to and reflecting on commonplaces, CCCC 2020 will deliver experiences that are both common and uncommon in relation to the traditions of the convention as an institution. The convention will continue to be a place for connection, reconnection, and the productive exchange of ideas. But it will include new kinds of common places for the purposes of sharing ideas and experiences as community (and as a community of communities), more opportunities conversation and reflection, new kinds of teaching and learning experiences for attendees, accessibility mentoring opportunities, and a new role and session type to invite new forms of participation:

  • New session type: the Engaged Learning Experience session. ELE sessions are spaces for invention, problem-solving, experiential learning.
  • New program role: the convention Documentarian. The Documentarian are invited/enlisted to document their particular convention experiences and to create a variety of reflective narratives about their experiences.
Engaged Learning Experience Sessions

A commonplace about sessions is that they generally consist of a panel of three sequential presentations. Engaged Learning Experience sessions are an alternative genre of concurrent session, a dedicated space for invention, problem-solving, and experiential learning. As with all sessions, leaders should think in terms of a learning goal and a means for moving participants toward it. In the case of Engaged Learning Experience sessions, some means for moving toward learning goals might include (things like) problem-solving groups, spoken-word poetry, dramatization/improv, making, role-playing, storytelling.

CCCC 2020 Documentarians

A commonplace about program participation is that in order to be listed as a contributor to the convention program, you must have a role in a scheduled session. In 2020, a new “speaking” role will be introduced: the Documentarian. The CCCC Documentarian role is an opportunity for attendees to participate in a new way, and to take part in a collaborative inquiry into what a conference is and does—and for whom—and to teach the rest of us. The Documentarian role has been designed to respond to four primary questions about how attendees experience the CCCC Annual Convention:

  1. What does it mean to attend the convention? The efforts of Documentarians will help the CCCC community better understand the range of attendees’ convention experiences.
  2. What do we learn at the convention? The Documentarian role is designed not only to document things that happen at the convention, and the perspectives of those who experience those things, but to help Documentarians—and those who may benefit from their stories—identify the learning they did by way of their convention experiences.
  3. What are the outcomes of a convention experience? The results of the Documentarians’ efforts will be made available to the CCCC community in a variety of ways, including both formal and informal publication of the resulting documentary stories.
  4. What does it mean to be included? How diverse are our experiences? The Documentarian role is meant to provide a new form of convention access to a broad range of attendees. Because they fill a “speaking” role (technically, a speaking back role), Documentarians will appear on the program.  

Documentarian roles are available to those with or without another speaking role at CCCC. For example, it is possible to be on the program solely as a Documentarian or as a panelist and a Documentarian. Documentarians’ products will be realized as a variety of written (i.e., alphabetic—not filmed or audio-recorded) products that capture highlights of, and reflections on, Documentarians’ convention experiences.

What will YOU do should you serve as a Documentarian? As a Documentarian, you’ll complete a brief instructional module, attend the convention, choose a path through the convention experience, record some observations about the things you see and hear, and then compose a reflective narrative about your experiences. To help you along in this work, you’ll be given a prompt and a set of guidelines for planning, attending, documenting, and reflecting on your experience with the convention. You’ll also be encouraged to meet and connect with other Documentarians throughout the convention in any spaces made available for this purpose. You can indicate your interest in serving in a Documentarian role as part of the regular review process.

Proposals for CCCC 2020

Regardless of role or session type, reviewers will be seeking proposals for talks and sessions that engage their audiences as learners. Successful proposals will

  • Engage the idea of commonplaces in some way, either directly or in terms of the work the presentation/session will do. Some ways to take up the idea might be (but are not limited to) to think of commonplaces as
    • tacit expectations
    • social constructions
    • claims to power
    • means for inclusion/exclusion
    • means for controlling access
    • world view
    • scenes of action
    • means to legitimize/delegitimize knowledge
    • enabling fictions
  • Describe an experience for learners as much as content to be delivered (for example, will specify the role(s) audience members will be invited to fulfill during or in response to the presentation).
  • Give evidence that the proposer is thinking pedagogically about the talk or session, with the learning needs of audiences/participants in mind.
  • Articulate learning goals for the participants, and means to get there: What will participants take away from the presentation? How do you plan to make it possible for them to do so?

We hope to see you in Milwaukee, our common place for CCCC 2020!

Julie Lindquist
2020 Program Chair

Submit a Proposal for the 2020 CCCC Convention

2019 CCCC Convention Program

CCCC 2019 Program CoverFull Program

(note: this is a large PDF file that may take several minutes to open)

Program by section

The 2019 Convention app is now available! Search for “NCTE” in your app store. Use the desktop version to upload your session materials.

Additionally, you can access the online version of the program here. Hard copies of the program will be available at registration.

       

Land and Water Acknowledgement for CCCC 2025

Statewide Land Acknowledgement Statement
Maryland State Arts Council

Read the Maryland State Arts Council’s “Statewide Land Acknowledgement Statement.” This statement is based on one drafted by an elder of the Choptico Band of Indians, Piscataway-Conoy Tribe for the MSAC Land Acknowledgement Project. Listen to an audio pronunciation guide.

For additional land acknowledgement resources from the Maryland State Arts Council, visit https://msac.org/resources/land-acknowledgements and the MSAC Land Acknowledgement Project Overview and Resource Guide.

Additional Resources

As rhetoricians, it is our responsibility to understand the history of the places where we live, teach, and gather. It is our responsibility to understand how the history of these places shapes the knowledge making, storytelling, teaching, and learning of Indigenous, Métis, and Innuit peoples. As scholars and as teachers, we have a responsibility to learn and to speak the truth about the historical legacies of settler-colonial language and literary education in residential and settler school systems as well as about contemporary settler colonialism within our profession.  

It is the responsibility of the Conference on College Composition and Communication to make actionable its commitments to healing relations and creating from this healing equal and reciprocal partnerships and alliances with Indigenous, Métis, and Innuit members of our profession. 

To begin meeting this responsibility, CCCC affirms its commitment to  

  • Advancing citation justice broadly and, in particular, advocating for reading, teaching, and citing the work of Indigenous, Métis, and Innuit scholars, writers, knowledge creators, and storytellers. We call on our membership to also make and act upon this commitment. 
  • Ensuring that the organizers of each Annual Convention focus on connecting Convention attendees with Indigenous communities on whose territories we gather to teach and learn with and for all our relations. 
  • Encouraging panelists at our gatherings, regardless of the subject of their presentations, to reflect on whether or how their work meets the needs and interests of Indigenous, Métis, and Innuit students; acknowledges the contributions of Indigenous, Métis and Innuit scholars; and addresses an audience that includes Indigenous, Métis, and Innuit peoples. 

Four books you should read that were written by CCCC American Indian Caucus members 

Anderson, Joyce Rain, Rose Gubele, and Lisa King. Survivance, Sovereignty, and Story: Teaching American Indian Rhetorics. Utah State UP, 2015. 

King, Lisa. Legible Sovereignties: Rhetoric, Representations, and Native American Museums. Oregon State UP, 2017.  

Mukavetz, Andrea Riley, with Frances Geri Roossien. You Better Go See Geri: An Odawa Woman’s Life of Recovery and Resilience. Oregon State UP, 2021.  

Wieser, Kimberly G. Back to the Blanket: Recovered Rhetorics and Literacies in American Indian Studies. U of Oklahoma P, reprint edition, 2017.  

To learn even more, check out this annotated bibliography of scholarship on American Indian and Indigenous rhetorics, with a special focus on those works produced by NCTE/CCCC Caucus members: https://kimberlywieser.oucreate.com/americanindianandindigenousrhetbib/ 

Four books you should read about settler colonialism, academia, and anticolonial research, teaching, and writing 

Garcia, Jeremy, Valerie Shirley, and Hollie Anderson Kulago. Indigenizing Education: Transformative Research, Theories, and Praxis. Information Age Publishing, 2022. 

Tuhiwai Smith, Linda. Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples. Zed Books Ltd. and U of Otago P, 1999. 

Wilson Shawn. Research Is Ceremony: Indigenous Research Methods. Fernwood Publishing, 2008.  

Younging, Gary. Elements of Indigenous Style: A Guide for Writing By and About Indigenous Peoples. Brush Education, Inc., 2018.

Special Saturday Events at #4C19

The Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC) Annual Convention features more than 750 sessions and events that highlight the most current thinking in the field. While most presenters come from the higher education space, many of the topics explored are relevant to secondary educators. Our common commitment to the success of the students we teach makes this Convention a great opportunity to exchange ideas and learn from one another.

Join us Saturday, March 16 at #4C19 for a day of invigorating learning! One-day registration is just $80 and includes access to the sessions highlighted below as well as many others.


 9:00 a.m. to 12:15 p.m. 

“Power to the People, No Delay.” The Transformative Force of Hip-Hop as Social Justice Catalyst

This workshop explores hip-hop’s roots in social justice and how this artistic, social, and cultural movement has opened and continues to open up spaces for oppressed peoples’ voices, experiences, and resistance. Participants will apply an organic intellectual approach from hip-hop to generate ways to make communities and/or schools inclusive and welcoming to all, as well as interact with a live performance and Q&A session with hip-hop artists K.Freshh and Dr. Hollyhood.

Dr. Hollyhood
K.Freshh

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 


12:30 to 1:45 p.m.

Choose from 41 concurrent sessions on a wide range of topics, including:

  • Transforming Everyday Digital Literacies
  • Writing and Teaching in STEM Collaborations
  • Cultivating Students’ Identities as Researcher-Writers
  • Contact Improv as Antiracist Composition
  • Revising Ideas of Genre in Writing of Academia, Fiction, and Comics
  • Teaching and Arguing in the Age of Outrage
Antonia Ruppert, Antonia Ruppert Fine Art: http//toniruppert.com

2:00 to 5:00 p.m.

Choose from 7 different workshops, including:

Theater as Antiracist Pedagogy: Audience, Empathy, and Privilege
Participants will experience theatrical exercises to foster empathy, examine privilege and place, and train students to engage in audience awareness, textual conversation, and form.

Revision as REmix: Hip-Hop Instructional Practice & the Art of Revision
By exploring the core elements of hip-hop, participants will learn to guide a hip-hop-infused lesson on revision for their students.

Learn more and register today! 

CCCC 2019 Cultural Event

Join us for the CCCC 2019 Cultural Event on Friday, March 15. Doors open at 7:30 p.m.

The event will feature a live band and performances from Dr. Elaine Richardson and Christopher Henderson, music by DJ Todd Craig, dancing, and dinner and a cash bar.

Register today via the CCCC 2019 registration form. If you already registered for the convention, follow the unique URL in your registration confirmation email to add the CCCC Cultural Event or call customer service at 877-369-6283.

CCCC 2019: Saturday Workshops

Saturday Workshops

Saturday, March 16, 2019 – 2:00 to 5:00 p.m. (unless otherwise noted)

(SW.01) Community Writing Mentoring Workshop

Sponsored by: The Coalition for Community Writing

Level: All

Cluster: Community, Civic & Public

Abstract: Sponsored by the Coalition for Community Writing, experienced scholar-practitioners will provide resources and offer individualized mentorship and feedback on community-based writing projects.

Full description:

Background
Community Writing, a growing subfield within Rhetoric and Composition, studies and implements writing about, with, for, and by local and global communities. Popularized by genres such as service-learning, community-based research, community literacy, ethnography, community publishing, public writing, and advocacy and activist writing, community writing locates its work within the broad, historical traditions of rhetoric and composition, literacy studies, and related disciplines.

In October 2017, the second Conference on Community Writing (CCW) took place at the University of Colorado Boulder, attracting 450 scholars, activists, and community members representing 48 states, three countries, 207 colleges, universities, and community organizations. This large group was drawn to a vision of higher education that connects with local, national, and international communities by using writing for education, public dialogue, and social change.

The overwhelming response to the conference underscored a desire by those working in community writing—as community organizers, students, teachers, and researchers—to have opportunities to network, share best practices, and receive mentoring. Attendees at the conference expressed a specific desire for mentorship from scholars, teachers, and activists with more experience in designing, implementing, sustaining, and evaluating community-based writing practices and the scholarship that emerges in concert with them. Additionally, at the conference, a group of leading scholars in the field began steps toward the creation of the Coalition for Community Writing.

This workshop responds to the desires expressed by the hundreds of attendees at the CCW conference for a hands-on opportunity for teachers, scholars, and community writers and organizers to dialogue with and receive feedback from senior scholars in community-based writing.

The Workshop

This proposed workshop, which will be sponsored by the new Coalition for Community Writing, will serve as the first mentorship event since the organization’s launch. The workshop will offer mentoring and feedback on community-based writing projects. It will be led by twelve scholars in rhetoric and composition, a diverse group of faculty who have deep experience with community projects and who have published many books and articles in community writing. Our group can offer advice related to project design, ethics of community work, ways to evaluate projects, questions related to scholarship, as well as job and tenure evaluation strategies.

This workshop will also showcase two mentorship projects associated with community writing. The first is a national online network of community writing practitioners through the Map of Community Writing, which we will launch at the workshop. The MCW will function as a mentorship and resource visualization tool for users to search and upload data to a national repository of community writing people, projects, and programs. The second project is a compilation of resources and mentorship opportunities, created by the CCCC Strategic Action Task Force over the last year in response to the threats against engaged scholars in the National Association of Scholars report and from other right-wing groups.

We invite participants at any level of experience with community-based writing who would like an opportunity for individual mentoring: those with early ideas and emerging projects, or those with long-term projects.

The workshop will open with each of the workshop facilitators giving a 3-minute account of their current research and the areas in which they can offer mentorship. We will then break into smaller groups of 5-6 at tables, with two facilitators at each table. Each participant will have the opportunity to share their research project, course, or program idea and receive feedback. Each participant can expect to present to the table for about 5 minutes and receive about 5-7 minutes of feedback, minimum. The timing will, of course, depend upon the number of attendees. While the senior scholar facilitators at the table will offer mentorship, others at the table may function as both mentor and mentee, based on experience. Participants will have the opportunity to switch tables once, providing them two sets of feedback and invaluable face-to-face communication with some of the leaders in the field of community writing.

In the last 45 minutes of the workshop, the Map of Community Writing (MCW)’s web developer will demonstrate the map’s capabilities and affordances and will guide participants in uploading their contact information and any materials they would like to share to the map. Finally, one of the workshop facilitators will share results and resources from the CCCC Strategic Action Task Force.

Afternoon Schedule, 1:00-4:30

1:00-1:30 Welcome and Facilitator Introductory Presentations
1:30-2:30 First Round of Mentorship Networking and Workshopping
2:30-2:45 Break
2:45-3:45 Second Round of Mentorship Networking and Workshopping
3:45-4:10 Introduction to the Map of Community Writing and Participant Input of Information
4:10-4:25 Discussion of CCCC Strategic Action Task Force resources
4:25-4:30 Closing Remarks and Plan for Follow-up Mentoring Meeting at the Conference on Community Writing in October 2019

(SW.02) Join the Cypher of Hip Hop Pedagogy and Practice!

Level: All

Cluster: Community, Civic & Public

Abstract: Come share your skills, pedagogies and practices in the cypher, to discuss Hip Hop in academia and the English composition classroom.

Full description:

Join the Cypher of Hip Hop Pedagogy and Practice!

The facilitator is a pioneering B-Girl from the early eighties Hip Hop scene in Seattle Washington, but she is still active in the Hawai’i Hip Hop community today. She has taught B-Boy/Girl workshops at several local YMCAs, B-Girl Be (Minneapolis), Girl Fest Hawai’i, Girl Power Hawai’i and many more. She is also an adjunct lecturer, graduate assistant and English instructor who incorporates Hip Hop “ways of seeing” into her curriculum.

This workshop invites Hip Hop pedagogues and practitioners to join a discourse about Hip Hop and its place in academia and English composition. The session includes empirical examples combined with a b-boy/girl dance lesson and a discussion or cypher for the co-performers.

2:00-3:00pm: In the first hour of this workshop the facilitator will demonstrate how to incorporate the five elements of Hip Hop (b-boying, emceein, djing, beatboxing, graffiti) into the college classroom with a focus on first year writing composition courses. Attendees will be asked to identify traditional literary forms that can be established within all the five elements such as repetition, format and style. We will then discuss how the five elements present a challenge to the Eurocentric epistemologies of argument and rhetoric.

3:00-4:00pm: The facilitator will then invite other Hip Hop pedagogues and practitioners to join the cypher and show their skills in the sixth element: knowledge, which for our purpose will be a collaboration between academics and emic experiences within Hip Hop Kulture. If the cypher calls for it, the facilitator will incorporate an example of the heated exchange between KRS One and what he calls “rap historians” to ruminate over the questions of who has the authority to teach, preserve and document Hip Hop. I expect the facilitator and co-performers to engage in a serious discussion about how professors can draw from Hip Hop to reform education without the risk of appropriation. The facilitator is open, however, to follow the flow and go wherever this discourse may lead us.

4:00-5:00 Finally, as a b-girl practitioner and teacher, the facilitator will lead the co-performers in a dance class to teach the foundations of b-boying/girling. Other practitioners in the cypher are welcome to assist in the instruction. The lesson will last about thirty minutes and it will be followed by one final discussion question, which is to consider the relevance of implementing a similar type class in the English classroom and consider how it could be implemented. The session will conclude with the co-performers experiences, final words and final cypher.

What I expect the facilitator and the co-performers to leave with is our shared experiences in the cypher.

Please come prepared with your kicks and active clothing attire.

(SW.03) Theater as Antiracist Pedagogy: Audience, Empathy, and Privilege

Level: All

Cluster: First-Year and Advanced Composition

Abstract: Theatrical exercises to foster empathy, examine privilege and place, and train students to engage in audience awareness, textual conversation, and form.

Full description:

As theater makers who have each taught First Year Composition for over a decade, we see the dramatic arts as both a theoretical and practical way of thinking about writing pedagogy and difference.  In particular, we are inspired by playwright Tony Kushner’s (1995) essay about the power performance has for training us to have empathy for The Other; by our lights, acting or directing or playwriting or even watching theater can encourage a kind of code-meshing (Canagarajah, 2006) in which the theater maker/watcher incorporates multiple codes, multiple languages, multiple performed selves.  The empathetic practices inherent in theatrical performance thus give rise to the kind of anti-racist pedagogy Innoue (2015) argues for when he asks teachers to construct assessment ecologies where students and teachers are “connected in explicit ways” (p.289); theater demands connection, performance creates interdependent ethos. In addition to empathy-fostering exercises, workshop attendees will explore how theater practices can train students to engage in audience awareness, textual conversation, and formal invention.  Which is to say that we position theater as part of the Teaching for Transfer movement (Yancey, Robertson, & Taczak, 2014). Continuing the work we presented in Portland (2017’s CCCC), in which a series of short presentations were each followed by a drama-fueled pedagogical exercise, we will explore both the ways performance can become source text and the ways it can inform student decisions regarding form, mode, genre.

Act 1. “Removing Privilege from the Parlor:  Hip Hop and the Burkean Oar”
Philosopher Kenneth Burke imagines a scenario where people are in a room having a conversation that continues indefinitely.  Situating his reader as “you,” he famously writes “Imagine that you enter a parlor. You come in late…You listen for a while, until you decide that you have caught the tenor of the argument; then you put in your oar.”  Burke’s metaphor encourages thinkers to contribute to an ongoing discourse; Burke can be an excellent tool for teaching students how to engage their own performative rhetoric in relation to that of others’. Yet what if the conversation is not accessible to all listeners?  This workshop aims to remove privilege from Burke’s parlor by utilizing hip hop to teach students about their own potential “oar.” Diving into Nicki Minaj’s “Anaconda” and Jay Z’s “Hard Knock Life,” Performer 1 will experiment with performative rhetoric and lead participants to consider their own relationship to this music.  What aspects of the discourse can we access easily? What seems far away from our own experience? How does that inform our individual voice’s relationship to this material? Together, we will ponder difficulty in teaching this material to privileged students and the wonders of prompting some of those without privilege to feel more grounded in a discourse than their peers.

Act 2. “Performing for Transfer: Site Specific Theater as Metaphor and Method for Teaching Audience and Genre Awareness.”
Performer 2 will mine a play, The Sublet Experiment, as a case study for the relationships between performance, audience, genre, and space.  The play, which had ran for over 6 months, was performed in a different New York City apartment every weekend.  Interrogating Miwon Kwon’s (2002) binary of integration/intervention in site specific art, Performer 2 will work with participants on an inductive process students can use for mapping the ways in which the play’s performances were changed by their sites and by their audiences.  The key concept this work introduces is Audience Closeness. How close is the audience to the performers, and how does that proximity change the choices the performers focus on? Workshop participants will experientially explore this concept by writing a short theory of audience awareness and then “acting” out that theory in front of other participants in three sitings: near-audience, circular-audience, and far-audience.  These performative metaphors of interdependence will then be transferred back into skills and processes connected to audience awareness in writing (e.g. how can students alter their writing depending on how “close” to themselves they imagine their audience to be, etc.). In this way, the workshop will extend the Teaching for Transfer work of Yancey, Robertson, & Taczak (2014). We will examine the TFT terms of audience and rhetorical situation in the setting of site specific performances and help students imagine different physical settings of audience as a way of understanding formal choices such as diction, exposition, citation requirements, and other generic demands.

Act 3. “Memoirs of Place: The Geographies of the Self”
As we walk down the street we can acknowledge that other people have inhabited this space before us, but can we imagine what they were thinking?  What their values and preoccupations were? What kept them up at night? One of the most intimate ways of understanding the performance of everyday life is through diaries and first-person accounts. This presentation and performance, based on a seminar taught at our home institution, will explore how a wide range of narratives can help give us multiple perspectives of a single place. Performer 3 will train participants to read diaries as performance: the New York of 1704 that greeted Sarah Kemble Knight, the perspective of Harriet Jacobs in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, the debates of Wong Chin Foo (one of the first naturalized Chinese immigrants).  These diaristic modes will be contrasted with “personal” place-centered performances that take the form of art, such as Anna Deavere Smith’s Fires in the Mirror.  Performer 3 will argue that a survey of first-person accounts provides students with many opportunities to engage in the varieties of lived experience from the bottom up.  The workshop will then lead participants through a multi-modal exercise, in which they will create an online map that highlights places where they have experienced something important, as well as excerpts from the experiences of others (found in poems, diaries, photos). In this way, participants will create a “geography of the self,” a collaborative composition that is built in relation to what others have experienced. This workshop will be an enactment of performing and constructing place through an integration of the self and The Other.

(SW.04) Building and Running an Academic Journal: A Behind-the-Scenes Workshop in Independent Publishing

Level: All

Cluster: Institutional and Professional

Abstract: This workshop demystifies journal editing to prepare new people to run established journals and support the creation of new journals.

Full description:

Building on the call to embody composing knowledges, this workshop offers performative/experiential learning for folks interested in explore how to create and manage academic journals, whether print-based, open access, hybrid, scholarly and/or pedagogical, or specialized (sometimes referred to as “niche”) journals. Working editors from Across the Disciplines, Composition Studies, Computers and Composition, and Literacy in Composition Studies will offer practical advice and purposeful activities based on our experiences as editors of diverse independent journals in rhetoric and composition. Our workshop is pitched to participants at various career stages: advanced graduate students, junior and midcareer faculty, as well as senior faculty seeking to contribute to the discipline in new ways. Our goal is to empower more field members to be actively involved in the knowledge-making process, encourage the creation of new publication venues that prioritize under-represented issues and voices, and to share the tools and practical know-how necessary to take an idea from conception to reality. Finally, as a supportive community of editors, we will continue the dialogue with participants after the workshop, offering advice, materials, and contacts, as appropriate. This workshop takes up the conference’s call to perform possibilities by opening up the often-closed world of journal editing with the goals of both preparing new people to participate in running already-established journals and supporting the creation of new journals.

Half-Day Workshop (1:30-5:00)

1:30-2:00: Introductions.
We will begin with a brief overview of the workshop facilitators’ experiences running and/or creating academic journals. Depending on the number of attendees, participants will introduce themselves and foreground their interests or purposes in this particular workshop (if attendance makes this untenable, participants will have similar opportunities within breakout sessions). We will then explain how the workshop will proceed, deriving our breakout session topics from the narrative we have shared about our own process and struggles. The introduction period will conclude with a few moments for participants to decide their “breakout menu” for the day.

2:00-2:50: Session One: What To Expect When Becoming an Editor

This session leads participants through activities designed to help them explore what to expect from journal editing. All participants will do this activity. Participants read and discuss material from journals, including mission statements, tables of contents, and editors’ introductions. The purpose is to explore what these artifacts demonstrate about audience, expectations for the journal, and the journal’s “persona.” Session activity will primarily be table-based, but the whole room will share discoveries in last 10 minutes.

2:50-3:00: Break

3:00-3:50: Breakout Session One
Participants choose one of the session foci, all of which will be made available to them in advance of the workshop.

A. Starting a Journal: In this breakout session, participants will start building a mission statement for a journal and explore the decisions they would need to make about their new journal. These include who to approach as potential members of the editorial board and how to pitch the journal to these people; editorial processes and structures; publishing platform and frequency of publication; budget and funding; training and staffing.

B. Infrastructural Technologies of Independent Journal Publishing: Participants will explore issues related to online publication, including the affordances and limitations of various platforms for academic publishing. Discussion of software for web and print layouts will also be considered. A special emphasis will be placed on open access (OA) technologies and CreativeCommons licensing schemes for authors and journals.

C. Stabilizing and Preserving Content: Print frontloaded the costs of publishing, but once the print object was created, stocking it on library shelves ensured its accessibility to scholars and preservation in the history of disciplinary knowledge. The free access to online publishing obscures the ephemeral nature of published digital content and shifts the costs of stable access and preservation to the back end, where editors must ensure a link to their authors’ work that is not reduced to “page not found.” This breakout establishes the importance of a strategic plan for ensuring scholarly content remains accessible to future readers and identifies the organizations and possibilities for doing so.

3:50-4:00: Break

4:00-4:50: Breakout Session Two
Participants choose one of the session foci, all of which will be made available to them in advance of the workshop.

A. Peer Review and the Role of the Editor: In this breakout session, participants will read reviewer letters and an initial draft of a subsequently published article (all with permission). Participants will strategize how to synthesize reviews, make decisions about submission, and decide on next steps. Discussion will address how to build a diverse group of reviewers who have the expertise necessary to fulfilling the journal’s publishing mission.

B. Starting a Journal: In this breakout session, participants will start building a mission statement for a journal and explore the decisions they would need to make about their new journal. These include who to approach as potential members of the editorial board and how to pitch the journal to these people; editorial processes and structures; publishing platform and frequency of publication; budget and funding; training and staffing.

C. Copyediting: Participants look at examples of manuscripts before they have undergone copyediting and develop a process for addressing the copyediting needs evident in the texts. This breakout foregrounds the ways that style decisions influence both the presentation of knowledge and larger practices in the field (citing student work, providing access to archival and other source material, etc.).

4:50-5:00: Whole-Group Discussion.
Participants reflect on workshop and articulate their next steps. For those interested in continuing dialogue, contact information may be shared.

(SW.05) Performing Curriculum in the Classroom: Designing Teaching for Transfer (TFT) Courses for Diverse Campuses

Level: All

Cluster: Writing Pedagogies and Processes

Abstract: In this design workshop, we will create adaptations of the Teaching-for-Transfer curriculum to help students perform in multiple scenes–classes, co-curriculars, workplaces, and personal writing.

Full description:

From a pedagogical perspective this understanding of rhetoric and performance becomes a valuable way of acknowledging that texts, experiences, and writing are always given meaning according to time, place, and context, and that this requires an attentiveness to the way developing writers come to view and produce meaning through shared performances, by those who value the progressive possibilities of rhetoric and writing instruction.

—David Green

How to design writing coursessupporting transfer of writing knowledge and practice has garnered considerable attention in Composition and Rhetoric, with scholars researching it and designing courses to facilitate it. Performing this work in a half-day workshop, we will focus on two goals: (1) acquainting participants with the research on the Teaching for Transfer curriculum; and (2) assisting them in designing writing courses, appropriate for their campuses, using the Teaching for Transfer (TFT) curricular design.

Articulated initially in _Writing across Contexts: Composition, Transfer, and Sites of Writing_, and now formally expanded through the 2017 CCCC Research Initiative-sponsored Writing Passport Project (http://writingacrosscontexts.blogspot.com/), the TFT curriculum is offered in first-year composition, upper-level writing, internships, and graduate TA preparation. In this CCCC Research Initiative-sponsored expansion, one of the goals has been to keep the integrity of the curriculum while adapting it appropriately for different purposes and student populations.

Each of the 8 locationshas a unique profile, and thus a unique situation for adapting the curriculum:

—University of Cincinnati Blue Ash College is an open-admissions, two-year, regional college in the UC system, with a highly diverse student population. The adaptations included a shift in readings and reductions in page lengths for assignments.

–Centralia College is a small, rural community college with open-admissions. The student population is predominantly first generation, with most students also working at least part-time. There are also numerous students above the age of 25 who have come to the college as part of worker-retraining or after a major life change. The adaptations for Centralia College were similar to those at Blue Ash, with an additional concern about time for reflection outside of class.

Bristol Community College, a mid-sized, urban, public comprehensive, two-year college, contains a population very much like that of Blue Ash and Centralia. In addition, Bristol has seen a remarkable growth in minority enrollment since the early 2000’s. Adaptations to the TFT curriculum included readings that speak to that diversity.

At UC Santa Cruz, an HSI, R1 university, student demographics have shifted significantly in the past five years, with a growing number of multilingual, international, and first-generation college students. Curricular adaptations have also included a shift in TFT readings, but to meet the campus GE outcomes of the course, the adapted curriculum included sustained inquiry with seven weeks devoted to the study of a self-selected topics over the course of a ten-week quarter.

The University of Denver, a private RU/H on the quarter system, is committed to interdisciplinarity, and students are encouraged to major in more than one area. This site focused on key terms and on the impact of visual mapping of key terms on the development of students’ theory of writing.

The University of Massachusetts Boston, a public, 4-year, majority-minority university in the Northeast, is home to a version of TFT adapted to an upper-level professional writing course that also serves as an introduction to the English major.

–At William Paterson University of New Jersey, a suburban, public 4-year HSI just outside New York City where students are often first generation college learners, more than 70% are commuters, and many are non-traditional students, the TFT curriculum was adapted to an upper level course in Technical Writing, with enrollment from across disciplines.

At Florida State University, a large public residential flagship with an increasingly diverse populationstudents often take internships: the question the research considered was how a condensed introduction to TFT might help these students succeed in their internships.

Given these diverse campuses, their sites of instruction, and the purpose of the TFT curriculumthe central question focusing this workshop is how adaptations of the TFT curriculum can help all students perform as writers in multiple scenes–including in classes, in co-curriculars, in the workplace, and in personal writing. Working toward that end, participants in the workshop will begin creating a TFT curriculum, or revise their existing curriculum with TFT concepts and practices, with feedback and reflection opportunities to continue after the conference.

Our schedule includes 8 segments.

–One: Setting the Scene
1:00

• Introduction of participants to each other
• Icebreaker activity
• Overview of workshop
• What participants want to know: collection of guiding questions from participants
• Exercise: What already works in your course/program?

–Two: Performing Transfer, Performing TFT
1:20

• Definition: transfer of writing knowledge and practice
• Implications of transfer research for classroom practice
• TFT: Key Terms, Systematic Reflection, Theory of Writing
• Key terms: the 8
• Systematic Reflection: definition/student examples
• Theory of Writing: definition/student examples
• Overview of assignments: major and minor examples, with readings

–Three: Remix: Bringing Together What Already Works with TFT
2:00

• Discussion at tables

–Four: Adapting TFT to Various Scenes
2:15

• Kinds of adaptations (e.g., readings)
• Community colleges: major adaptations
• Upper level writing: major adaptations
• Internships: major adaptations

–BREAK
2:45

–Five: Design/Curricular Drafting Session at Tables
3:00
● Basic writing
● FYC at 4-year schools
● FYC at 2-year schools
● Upper level writing
● Internships

–Six: Critical Friends Activity
4:00
● Promising aspects of the draft curriculum
● Aspects of the curriculum to be revised

–Seven: Notes to Self
4:30
• Remix: participant questions and TFT
• Next steps for individual curricular designs

–Eight: Closing Reflection/Staying Connected
4:50

(SW.06) Revision as REmix: Hip Hop Instructional Practice & the Art of Revision

Level: 2-year

Cluster: Writing Pedagogies and Processes

Abstract: In this workshop, teachers will explore hip hop instructional practices to help students overcome the common struggle of revising their work.

Full description:

In this workshop, teachers will explore hip hop instructional practices to help students overcome the common struggle of revising their work. By exploring the core elements of hip hop, participants will learn to guide a hip-hop infused lesson on revision for their students. To explore these core elements, participants will write, learn about hip hop sampling and practice revision. This interactive workshop incorporates elements of music, movement, and art.

Teaching students about hip hop sampling, helps connect the act of essay revision to an art form with which many students interact daily: the art of sampling. Getting students to realize how different samples are from the original makes clear the expectation for revision. The other elements I will employ while sharing this lesson are a “meta” presentation on how instructors might embrace hip hop culture overall. Through practicing additional elements throughout the course of workshop, attendees will gain a greater sense of how having a hip hop sensibility might impact their instruction beyond discussing hip hop sampling.

Inter-contextually, rhetorical theory itself encompasses oral and written communication. In a 1992 4Cs position paper, Casaregola argued eloquently that “generation by generation since the Renaissance and the development of print, moved further away from the origins of rhetoric origins that lie in the art of oral rhapsodic composing” (2). He furthers that “ the single most important aspect of ancient rhetoric was its oral performative nature–ancient rhetoric was an art of oral performance, even before it was derided by Plato or described by Aristotle” (4).

This presentation honors the performative nature of rhetoric by incorporating spoken word. The teachers will practice spoken word as a means to become more empowered educators through spoken word. Embodying spoken word will in turn help them to connect with the writing exercise in a performative manner. Though the main instructional component for students will be the discussion of sampling evident in the song clips shown, the main pedagogical component for attendees of the conference will be an embracing of hip hop culture through the use of practicing spoken word. The spoken word component is a means by which teachers may open themselves up to other components of hip hop, such as rap music. I will begin by showing a spoken word poem by Taylor Mali. Then, I will lead teacher-attendees through a series of prompts to create their own spoken word piece.

The questions that I will use for the writing prompt include the following:
1. When did you find your voice as an educator, and how did it impact your identity as both an educator and a person in the world?
2. How has (or might) this identity helped (or help) to increase access to the promise of education for Black and brown students?
3.Use the first letters of your name (first, last, or a combination) to write an acrostic poem that captures your responses to questions 1 & 2.

Then, I will share with them a lesson for teaching revision that I have found to work well with my students. This technique is performative in nature as well, as it involves a lesson on hip hop sampling. Once attendees engage with the lesson, they will then revise their work using the “sampling” technique introduced. I will play clips of songs that have later been sampled and have attendees note the differences between the two songs. This discussion about the practice of sampling will lead into a definition of revision. After this discussion, attendees will consider how they might write a new poem in the same way the hip hop song created a new song from sampling a previous musical arrangment. Teachers will have time to “sample” the first drafts of their poems by using the first draft written to create a new poem.

From there, we will prepare for an open mic session where they share their work. There will have been emphasis placed on “embodying” the poem, as an important component of spoken word. During the time allotted teachers attending the workshop will have the opportunity to perform the spoken word pieces that they create during the writing and revision process. Thus, the workshop will transform into a performative open mic space.

By using an open mic format, this session will flip the traditional conference model on its head by asking attendees to embody the teaching practice they are learning rather than sit down and soak up information. It is meant to be audience-oriented and performative. The teachers will be engaged as co-performers after they have revised their spoken word pieces. We will all gain knowledge of what helps us find voice as teachers.

We will also gain a new way of thinking about the connections between teaching composition and hip hop culture. Attendees will benefit by gaining a new sense of voice and a way to make marginalized centered in their classrooms.

This approach is inclusive and aimed at providing greater access to composition to students historically marginalized in these courses, including African-American and Latino students. Many of these students have to repeat composition. Teaching students to constructively revise their drafts is one way to ensure they become more successful writers. As an African-American female, hip hop educator, I feel that my own voice is underrepresented. I have been in the shoes of my students and am offering a way for my colleagues to uncover what makes those of us who are underrepresented in the academy feel more connected to the space.

(SW.07) DBLAC Writing Workshop

Special note: This workshop will run from 9:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. on Saturday, March 16.

Sponsored by: Digital Black Lit and Composition (DBLAC)

Level: All

Cluster: Institutional and Professional

Abstract: This Writing Workshop is an extension of DBLAC’s goal to foster a learning community where members are able to present their ideas, research, and writing amongst emerging scholars as a means of professional support and development. During this workshop, participants will be encouraged to share writing goals and writing activities.

Full description:

On the final Saturday of the conference, DBLAC will host a Writing Workshop for DBLAC members (graduate students and supporting faculty and community members).

DBLAC is an online and in-person network of Black-identified graduate students and advanced undergraduate students in fields related to the study of language. Our goal is to provide spaces and opportunities for our members that support their success. In doing so, we work diligently to uplift, support, and highlight the work of Black graduate students. You can read more about our mission and some of our work on our website: dblac.org.

Though many of our programs are tailored to Black graduate students, we are increasingly aware of the collective and universal need for community, especially in intellectual pursuits. That considered, we strive to share our methods and also to promote supportive communal interactions when possible. Our Writing Workshop is an extension of our organization’s goal to foster a learning community where members are able to present their ideas, research, and writing amongst emerging scholars as a means of professional support and development.

During the Writing Workshop, participants will be encouraged to share writing goals and work through individual projects and writing activities.

(SW.08) “Power to the People, No Delay.” The Transformative Force of Hip-Hop as Social Justice Catalyst

Special note: This workshop will run from 9:00 a.m. to 12:15 p.m. on Saturday, March 16.

Level: All

Cluster: Community, Civic & Public

Abstract: This workshop explores Hip Hop’s roots in social justice and how this artistic, social and cultural movement has and continues to open up spaces for oppressed peoples’ voices, experiences, and resistance.

Full description:

This workshop explores Hip Hop’s roots in social justice and how this artistic, social and cultural movement has and continues to open up spaces for oppressed peoples’ voices, experiences, and resistance. Facilitators will highlight ways that Hip Hop is an important site of interrogation, especially in current times, and how youth and organizers worldwide are using hip-hop to re(construct), maintain, and negotiate their local situations and identities. A performance and lyrical deconstruction by a Hip Hop artist will be an interactive part of this workshop, as well as open times for discussion, questions and contributions from workshop participants.

In our Saturday Hiphop workshop, participants will:

  • interact with a live performance and Q&A session with Hiphop artists K. Freshh and Dr. Hollyhood
  • learn how Hip-hop inspired artists, activists, organizations, and coalition work can bring awareness to the need for criminal justice reform, ending state-sanctioned violence of unarmed people of color, as well as movements for environmental and educational justice
  • view protests, performances, and news video clips to generate dialogue to enhance approaches to Hiphop Education in Composition and Rhetoric courses, Secondary and Community College English courses, as well as community outreach
  • consider how Hiphop artists exhibit organic intellectual moves connected to social justice in their lyrics, words, interviews, music videos, performances, speeches, etc. and how the ideas these artists explore can prompt questions or actions to take with social issues, policies, etc. in the community of Pittsburgh
  • apply an organic intellectual approach from Hiphop to identify individuals or groups of people in communities and/or schools that may be forgotten about or marginalized in some ways and generate ways to make communities and/or schools inclusive and welcoming to all
  • discuss Hiphop intellectuals’ use of language to promote social justice and then identify how language is used/could be used in local (Pittsburgh) and state (PA) government to promote positive policies, laws, or any social issues

CCCC 2019: Wednesday All-Day Workshops

All-Day Workshops

Wednesday, March 13, 2019 – 9:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m.

(W.01) Performing Academic Writing in the Real World: Poverty, Disability, and Cultural Contexts in Basic Writing

Sponsored by: Council on Basic Writing (CBW)

Level: All

Cluster: Basic Writing

Abstract: This interactive workshop focuses on how writing and teaching are performed in complex student and institutional contexts.

Full description:

This workshop interrogates the “performance” of academic writing in real world contexts which require our students to perform student behavior and writing. The workshop responds to needs regarding how to best design writing experiences for increasingly diverse groups of students in our classrooms. Peter Adams, founder of ALP, asserts that Basic Writing Students have complicated lives: “Most of them are working, some full-time, some more than full-time and most of them are on financial aid because they come from impoverished backgrounds. Most of them are first generation to go to college.” The classroom is also always a locus for performative acts by both teachers and student. Brenda Jo Bruggermann and Debra A. Moddelmog contend that “The act of disclosing a historically abject identity in the classroom has had significant pedagogical consequences as well.[. . .]. It has also given the teacher a body, and not only a performing body but one that functions (or does not function) in physical [. . .] ways” (312). It is through these two lenses that CBW focuses its 2019 workshop.

The workshop will ask participants to write short vignettes based on real world situations encountered with Basic Writing students (multiple absences for missing the bus, dealing with child care issues, lack of funds, struggling with self-confidence, difficulty with self-advocacy). Throughout the day, these vignettes will be performed to mark transitions from one activity to another. We will return to these vignettes at the end of the day as we perform our roles as scholars of rhetoric and teachers of basic writing by continuing our work in moving toward a position statement on Basic Writing.

Speaker 1: “All Access, All In(clusive)” will allow participants to address elements of their writing classrooms (certain assignments, activities, rubrics, forms of interaction and engagement, expectations and outcomes articulated, etc.) from the outset using principles of Universal Design for Learning (UDL) so that learning and interactions are optimally inclusive for all kinds of learners (disabled and temporarily able-bodied) This engaged and interactive talk, workshop and discussion about teaching writing based on the principles of Universal Design for Learning (UDL) will talk aboutthe three triangulated networks of learning as they might be developed in your writing classroom: affective (the why); recognition (the what); strategic (the how).

Poster Session 1: Teaching Students how to Perform Science Writing: Rethinking STEM Writing as a Site of Basic Writing
This session will explain why science writing is a site of BW and teach participants how to rethink their approach to teaching the genre in the context of performance. We will base our presentation on a comprehensive pilot study that explored what are essential science writing knowledge gaps that exist in basic science writers (BSW) and hinder composition performance.

Poster Session 2: “Inside Our Classroom: Basic Writing Today” will highlight the work of scholars of color
The CBW has a long-standing commitment to racial justice and inclusivity. As such, we are designating a portion of our program to highlighting the work of scholars of color, with particular emphasis on newer scholars. We will do a call for participation in Fall 2018 via our CBW-listserv, our Facebook Community Page, and our blog.

Speaker 3: Teaching with Disabilities: How does a teachers’ disability impact a classroom? What is at stake for them in their teaching? In their position within an institution? What impact does visible or invisible disability have on student awareness of these subject-positions. This speaker will discuss moving from a position of temporarily able-bodied to disabled and offer strategies for this transition as well as crowd-sourcing from participants discussion around their own experiences.

Speakers 4 and 5: Interrogating and Challenging Deficit Models in Basic Writing

Participants will explore issues that commonly affect student performance beyond traditional academic measures. Such issues might include: outside work schedules, lateness or absences in class, economic hardships, time management, struggles with traditional academic genres, lack of clarity about expectations between previous schooling and college environment. Sometimes framed as deficits in BW Conversations, instead, we will apply specific problem-solving techniques to consider how affective issues impact our classrooms and how we can support student success by acknowledging, solving (where possible) and/or directing students to additional resources and support.

In addition to looking at student success and deficit thinking in terms of students, we also assert that it is important to examine how teacher-scholars use language to engage with students. Socio-linguistic examination of teacher talk and classroom discourses are essential to creating language practices which do not reinforce rhetorics of deficit. It is common to use terms like “non-cognitive” and “affect” to describe the nuanced and complex lives our students bring to the classroom, including deeply embodied intersections of race, class, gender, and disability. These speakers examine teachers’ experiences in the classroom and invite participants to examine their classroom language practices and how they might resist or support the rhetoric of deficit.

Workshop participants will brainstorm relevant issues from both the student and teacher perspective. Then, collectively will identify both traditional and innovative methods to support student success, resulting in a list of practices, resources, and references to share. These resources will be a tangible product of the workshop, publicly accessible.

Speaker 6: Toward a Position Statement on Basic Writing Studies During the 2017 and 2018 CBW workshop, participants worked through an intentional brainstorming processes to develop a draft of principles of basic writing studies. Building on that draft, the facilitators of this final session will lead workshop members through further discussion, debate, revisions, and ratification of those principles. Ideally, the 2018 workshop will end the day by formalizing an official position statement on the teaching and study of basic writing that might disseminated outside the organization. Workshop participants will ultimately be participants in developing and establishing a cohesive vision statement on basic writing to the CCCC Executive Council and beyond.

(W.02) Living Feminist Lives: Materialities, Methodologies, and Practices

Sponsored by: Feminist Caucus

Level: All

Cluster: Community, Civic & Public

Abstract: Inspired by Sara Ahmed, this sponsored workshop explores ways to “live a feminist life” as teachers, administrators, researchers, scholars, and community members.

Full description:

Sponsored by the Feminist Caucus, the Feminist Workshop will explore ways that we live our feminist practices in the work that we do. Drawing on Sara Ahmed, we urge panelists to ask “ethical questions about how to live better in an unjust and unequal world…how to create relationships with others that are more equal; how to find ways to support those who are not supported or are less supported by social systems; how to keep coming up against histories that have become concrete, histories that have become as solid as walls” (Living a Feminist Life 1). As feminists in the field of composition-rhetoric, we consider these questions central to performing our labors as educators and researchers.

This day-long workshop will focus on ways to do feminist work toward a more equitable future. The workshop features morning and afternoon panels, followed by break-out discussion groups and a rotation of interactive exercises.

Speakers
1 and 2: Speakers One and Two will reflect on how they enact, embody, and teach feminist rhetorical practices in scholarship and teaching, in institutions and communities, exploring critical issues of intersectionality, power dynamics, and social justice. Speaker One will talk about how feminist rhetorics frame her practices in working with communities, drawing from three projects related to Communities Who Know, Inc., a non-profit organization. Speaker Two will explore how feminist rhetorical practices have been taken up in unexpected places, including research focused on the rhetoric of men’s rights, queer scholarship, and non-feminist spaces.

3: Community engagement projects put feminism in action, allowing students and faculty members to join critical cultural dialogues. Speaker Three will discuss a community engagement project with a Georgia refugee community, which includes over 21,000 DACA-impacted individuals. An example of feminism in action, this project moved her, her students, and the refugees, which resulted in new questions and understandings of immigration activism and advocacy. The presentation will discuss the project as well as the need for what Ahmed describes as “feminist tendencies, a willingness to keep going despite or even because of what we come up against” in community-engaged pedagogies and projects.

4: Speaker Four will offer a feminist exploration of teaching for transfer. Various models have emerged for facilitating such transfer. However, while composition studies is often distinguished by critical approaches to writing and teaching, there remains a critical element missing from the discussion surrounding transfer: feminist pedagogical practices. By applying a feminist lens, this speaker will reveal hidden biases, critically question the approach in light of gender, and question power struggles and structures in teaching models that encourage transfer.

5: Speaker Five’s presentation examines the ways the embodied experiences of women of color have historically been that of exclusion, and how we can move forward in a culture that often continues to silence such voices. This sense of exclusion, often felt in academia, is tied to the patriarchal white power structure that still pervades our national identity. In order to move forward, we must acknowledge the lived experiences of women of color. Based on the work of Chicana feminist Gloria Anzaldua, this presentation challenges us to consider how powerful the experiences and histories of marginalized voices can be.

6: When we in academia conduct research, write up our results, and publish our research in respected, refereed journals, our work often erases the individual in the name of “science” and “rigor.” In this presentation, Speaker Six argues that as researchers and as feminists we must reveal the ways meaning is made in our field, reflect with care on the personal inflections behind the academic prose, and imagine ways our work can circulate in the world in unexpected, human, non-disciplinary ways. After sharing some of the ways passion animates her current research on one 19th century woman’s insane asylum memoir, she leads the audience in discussion of the ways passion has animated their own scholarship.

7: Speaker Seven will present her journey through the archives at the CUNY Dominican Institute at the City College of New York. As a second generation Latina doing research on the exchange of ideas regarding women and sex between the Dominican Republic and the United States, she needed to “do comparative work responsibly” (LuMing Mao). In this presentation, she argues for a shift in her research lens to account for Dominican feminist history. She will provide a methodology to critically engage with various feminisms and remove our ethnocentric perspective of U.S. based feminism.

8: Speaker Eight outlines the challenge of working with three transnational archives before considering how global scholars might articulate a more critically and rhetorically cautious approach. She will invite workshop participants to examine the constitution and reconstitutions of three transnational archives in order to raise the following questions: While decolonizing archival methodologies call for postcolonial hybridity (Tuhiwai-Smith 2012) and an ethic of accountability (Walsh 2012), how is this achieved when the archive itself is dynamic, circulatory, or not indigenous? Moreover, how can these hybrid and accountable archival methodologies avoid the entrapments of “neo-colonialism” (Nkrumah 1965)?

9: When Maxine Waters’ “reclaiming my time” performance went viral in the summer of 2017, the California congresswoman extended a dialogue about temporality, frustration, and respect that Black women have used to achieve their political needs. Speaker Nine’s talk will show how “reclaiming my time” and other rhetorics of impatience highlight the public and private work of self-care that bell hooks and other feminist scholars consider essential for wellness, work that involves making “it evident to all observers of our social reality that black women deserve care” and “respect…” (hooks 40).

Meeting day/space needs: Wednesday from 9 a.m.-5:00 p.m. / AV & sound equipment, internet accessibility / Need room for 50 people.

Debriefing: Review of the workshop and plans for the future to submit to the CCCC Feminist Caucus Standing Group.

(W.03) Plant Something: Performance-Rhetoric, Community Writing, and Food Activism

Level: All

Cluster: Community, Civic & Public

Abstract: This workshop will explore community food advocacy organizations and sites for food justice, community building, and education via an interactive discussion and afternoon work party.

Full description:

Community gardens are emerging as important sites for social justice, community building, access to fresh food, and education. (Pena 2005, Cutter- Mackenzie 2008). Ron Finleyrenamed himself the gangsta gardener as part of a larger project to grow food for himself and his community. Integral to this project is his performance of gardening as a gangsta, a deliberate strategy he uses to redefine the gardener as sexy and appealing to urban youth so as to intervene in racist systems that create food deserts and feed the school-to-prison pipeline (Finley 2015, Fair Test 2010). In the documentary about him and other urban gardeners in LA, Can You Dig This, Finley says: “….you see the seed totally changes itself; it destroys itself and then you get life. A lot of things about life made more sense to me the more time I spent in the garden. The garden teaches a system- patience, persistence, care, that things don’t happen instantaneously you know, it is a process, everything is a process.” Embedded in Finley’s thinking is the transformative power of deliberate activist performance, along with a critique of discourse removed from action. At the end of the film he says: “Don’t call me if you want to have meetings and you sit around and talk about doing some shit. Come to the garden, wit your shovel, so we can plant some shit.” This workshop explores what this means for composition studies, for us as academics, teachers and scholars, and as members of diverse communities. It asks us to consider what this means in terms of performing the rhetoric we write: how we, as Frankie Condon suggests, “put [our] money where [our] mouth is” and “[transform] who we think we are or could be with and for others.” How can we rhetorically and physically engage in cultural and material work that contributes to projects like Finley’s and those of other urban food activists without appropriating them?

Building on the rhetorical analysis of Finley’s work and its impact in Eileen Schell, W. Kurt Stavenhagen, and Dianna Winslow’s CCCC 2018 panel: “The Language, Literacy, and Labor of Food Justice: Transforming Communities through Collective Action with Food and Farming,” this workshop investigates the ideological and material work necessary to further food justice. Understanding our field as one that is both deeply committed to praxis and also constrained at times by narrow definitions of literacy, we invite participants to a two-part, day-long workshop that creates a space for us to do as Condon suggests and “[move beyond] the self/other binary to articulating at the joint or point of interdependence between us” and in so doing, “deliberately, reflectively reach for performativity: for being and becoming just as we advocate for justice.”

During the morning workshop, we will open with a discussion of our work; the work of our field; our students’ work; the work of being human in a more-than-human world; and the work of being good neighbors to the diverse people, plants, and other inhabitants of our communities. As Paul Lynch underscores, in the apocalyptic turn in composition studies, worsening material conditions of climate change necessitate both assessment and commensurate performative action to address visceral realities: rising student hunger on college campuses and food insecurity across the globe; the encroachment of for-profit industry into public education and the privatization of other public services and spaces; and troubles posed by climate change demand that we compose a better world (Lynch 2012, Welch and Scott 2016, Broton and Goldrick-Rab 2017, FOA of the UN 2017, Newfield 2018, IPCC 2017). Citing new materialism, indigenous theories of kinship, and activist rhetoric, facilitators will present research and projects that address these challenges, including food justice, social media, and community writing (Gries 2015, Riedner and Mahoney 2008, House 2014, Pennell 2018, Cushman and Blackburn 2013). During the second half of the morning, we will split into small groups for interactive planning sessions that will employ permaculture and retroactive path analysis to visualize ways forward while also focusing our attention on the material at hand (Mollison 1978, Hemenway 2015, Gare 2001).

During the afternoon, we will travel off-site for work parties that pair our words with action. We will partner with area organizations Grow Pittsburgh and 412 Food Rescue to assist in planting seedlings in a greenhouse with the former and perform a “food rescue” with the latter. Working with advocates at these food justice organizations will invite participants to think, talk, touch, and taste as they engage with the spaces and places of Pittsburgh communities and make material-discursive connections with our own campuses and classrooms. Practicing what the morning session will define as relational literacy, such connections will prompt us to consider how to better serve our home communities with our students. Following the model of Transition Townswe will learn more about permaculture and consider applications in other settings (Hopkins 2006). Finally, we will practice using social media during our work party to create an intervention in the convention narrative to draw attention to the material conditions in Pittsburgh, and highlight the work the Pittsburgh community partners are doing to move to better futures as possible actions we can take back to our home communities (Massumi 2002).

(W.04) Performing Our Lives: Creative Nonfiction and (the Art and Rhetoric of) Representation

Sponsored by: Creative Nonfiction Standing Group

Level: All

Cluster: Creative Writing

Abstract: Participants will explore creative nonfiction through writing to prompts and discussing teaching strategies and issues.

Full description:

This workshop, sponsored by the Creative Nonfiction Standing Group, invites participants to experience a day of writing creative nonfiction and exploring ideas for teaching this multi-faceted genre. The life writing and other genres of creative nonfiction are steeped in the fraught question of representation. How do we represent ourselves? How do we represent others? What are the ethical gains and costs of these endeavors? This workshop focuses on the craft and ethics of composing in these genres as we write to perform ourselves and our lives and learn how to teach our students to do so.

Schedule:
9:00 Introductions
9:15 Prompts 1 & 2
9:30-10:30 Writing time & sharing
10:30-10:45 Break
10:45 Presentation 1
11:15 Prompts 3 & 4
11:25-12:30 Writing time & sharing
12:30-1:30 Lunch (sharing of writing encouraged)
1:30 Presentation 2
2:00 Prompts 5 & 6
2:10-3:00 Writing time & sharing
3:00-3:15 Break
3:15 Prompts 7 & 8
3:25-4:15 Writing time & sharing/revision
4:15-4:50 Reading of excerpts from the day’s writing; reflections on teaching approaches
4:50 Evaluation

SPEAKER 1 (prompt): Hide and Seek
Write about something you’ve hidden: perhaps it’s a letter, a gift, a bottle, a scar, a bill, your web browser history, a tattoo, your natural hair color. Write about what you’ve hidden but also seek understanding, whether you’re seeking to understand your own motivation or the particular effects (on yourself and others) of hiding something.

SPEAKER 2 (prompt): Whose Memory Is It Anyway?
Memories tug at us, haunt us, ground, and inspire us. But memories are rarely wholly our own. Choose a memory that includes one or more people and write about the time/place/event from one of these other perspectives. Or write about a memory you treasure, but that was largely constructed for you – think, perhaps, of family or community lore that you weren’t necessarily present for and yet have memories of through stories and/or pictures.

SPEAKERS 3 & 4 (presentation): Performing the Liminal: Creative Nonfiction as Lived Practice
Creative nonfiction occupies liminal space, existing at the interstices of various genres and definitional contradictions. CNF both bridges and frustrates divides between creative and academic modes; personal and scholarly. Far from a vexed position, this interstitial placement is powerfully productive in genre, method, and pedagogy. The presentation discusses the ways that CNF’s generativity derives from its liminality and argues that CNF develops student capacity to inhabit liminal spaces and derive the benefit of negative capability, perhaps more effectively than rhetoric-based models of composition instruction.

SPEAKER 5 (prompt): Performance (and Frame)
For this exercise we’ll generate titles as the first act of writing performance, using those titles to frame lists of rapid-fire details. For inspiration, we’ll skim two essays from Brevity—Brian Arundel’s “The Things I’ve Lost” and Gretchen Legler’s “Things That Appear Ugly or Troubling but Upon Closer Inspection Are Beautiful.” Students asked to do this essay have come up with such gems as: “Times I Wish My Car Had Broken Down” and “Relationships I’ve Lost Because We Kissed During the Wrong Scene of a Movie.”

SPEAKER 6 (prompt): The Microscope and the Telescope
Change the lens on a writing-in-progress. View the experience from a microscope: If there is skin, look at the pores; if there are leaves, study the veins. Change to the telescope: Leap from first person POV to third. Move from explaining the present to exploring the past or speculating on the future. Write an earth-bound experience from the vantage point of the moon. How do the lenses change what you offer the reader?

SPEAKER 7 (presentation): True Stories as Witness to the Human Condition
This presentation will examine common elements of true stories that witness to the human condition, using David Sedaris’s “Let It Snow” as a tragi-comic case in point. These stories, highly specific, yet universal, are about people on the edge. They are full of surprises, problems to solve, possibilities, resilience, advocacy, and hope, expressed through plot, characters, dialogue and action. Their life-saving power provides models for all to hear and tell their own.

SPEAKER 8 (prompt): Letter
Adapted from psychologist James Pennebaker’s work with expressive writing and healing, this prompt invites participants to write a letter to someone they have an intimate connection with such as a partner, family member, or close friend. Choose an unresolved conflict to immediately or eventually address in the letter. The conflict could be something smaller like stealing your sibling’s Halloween candy or larger like addressing an infidelity.

SPEAKER 9 (prompt): Sense Memory
We well know the power of the senses of smell and taste and their connection to memory: your grandmother’s perfume, fresh-mown lawns, chess pie, etc. What about the flip side of that scenario? How do smell and taste remind us of how we’ve evolved and what we’re glad to leave behind?

SPEAKER 10 (prompt): Performing Silence
Think of a time when you deliberately performed silence. Was your silence an act of resistance, or an expression of accord? Did it signal acquiescence, humility, compassion, distrust? Return to the moment with your body and the space it inhabited: where were you, and what were you doing? Zoom in: what was happening in your muscles, your gut? First describe the details that conveyed your silence’s meaning. Then, if you like, give direct voice to the words underneath that silence.

SPEAKER 11 (prompt): Spectacular Opera Performances: Do They Strike a Chord?
According to American composer Robert Starer, “The sung word is stronger than the spoken word. It evokes hard-to-reach places in the human soul.” After listening to two spectacular opera performances, see if they strike a chord with you. Does the sung word resonate with something in your soul? Given the plot and the opera characters’ plight, what might be shared human experiences? Do the characters remind you of a time when you were in a similar situation?

(W.05) Remixing Performance in Games

Sponsored by: Council for Play and Game Studies

Level: All

Cluster: Information Technologies

Abstract: Participants will explore theories of play and games emphasizing performance, remixing existing games to create new performances, and concluding with an escape room challenge.

Full description:

Similar to how academic writing demands students perform in strange and often uncomfortable ways, games demand performance of players. Within games, play, mechanics, and narrative intertwine to create a multi-layered ethos that players perform. As the embodiment of gameplay often elicits emotions from and between them, players come to empathize with (Isbister) or critically resist and subvert (Sicart) the specific subject positions and narratives that games create for them. But games have become so pervasive and commonplace that we hardly recognize how they support prevailing rhetorics of power. Nonetheless, even the simplest of games offer the means with which students not only develop their abilities to comprehend these power structures but also tactically subvert them. This remixing of games, in other words, demands that the students performthrough the processes of critical inquiry, interpretation, and presentation which in turn transfers to their composition practices.

To begin, workshop participants will briefly survey theories underpinning approaches to various types of performance in games. Play is typically divided into at least three identities or roles simultaneously occupied by players: a person playing a game (social role), a player working within the parameters of a game (player role), and a character in a world (performative role) (Fine; Hendricks; MacKay; Cover). These roles are determined and constrained by game mechanics, the operations and actions that are possible to perform in a game. Facilitators will encourage participants to analyze how these game elements convey rhetorical spaces and possible roles that players can perform through play.

As Ian Bogost argues in Persuasive Games, game procedures, specifically the mechanics and rules of gameplay, create embodied arguments for players. However, as Miguel Sicart notes, games create a dialectical interplay between procedural gameplay and the often ideologically-laden narrative worlds they represent. Changes made to game mechanics necessarily alter the messages they communicate and performances they evoke. In the next section of the workshop, small groups will collaborate on disrupting one of several games provided to them. In the game of tic-tac-toe, for example, how do familiarity and pattern recognition elicit performances that simulate the banal and “everyday”? How might we intervene in these simulations to disrupt the roles players perform? What narratives are evoked when the Xs and Os are replaced with other tokens? What tactics need to be reconfigured if we manipulate the familiar 3×3 grid? As a result, the interplay between the narrative world and the mechanics that enact its ideology thrusts players into a particular performative roleor ethos, similar to ancient Greek notions of ethos as habituated action (Hawhee; Holmes).

The second part of the workshop will consist of a stations-style breakout session, allowing participants to explore examples of classroom-ready games in action, each station guided by a facilitator or two. Specifically, we will make use of the full spectrum of games: live-action role playing games, tabletop role-playing games, augmented and virtual reality games, board games, card games, and mobile games. We will challenge participants to critically examine the game mechanics and the worlds they build at each station, then purposefully and meaningfully remix one game mechanic in order to create a new rhetorical world. Specifically, participants will re-envision how these mechanics can teach by embodying a particular ideological narrative world, but then we will introduce a critical disruption by introducing the idea of remix: asking them to use the same mechanic to embody a different ideological narrative or to use the same narrative to embody a different game mechanic. Through play, they will then investigate the types of performances their alterations encourage, and the group will reflect on their experiences. We will explore questions of how games elicit performance and perform upon players, focusing on cooperative performance and which performative qualities mesh effectively with writing. For instance, traditionally, tic-tac-toe is a game of dominance where one player tries to defeat the other by claiming a line of space first. What happens when the winner is destroying the claimed space with toxic chemicals? How could the goals and rules of the game change as a result? What happens when the winner is setting aside the space for a national park? How could players renegotiate the rules to make the game cooperative, freeing up more space for conversation?

Finally, we will conclude with an “escape the workshop” challenge that utilizes clues participants earn as they participate within the workshop, and in order to figure out the clues, they will have to perform the workshop’s themes of remix, creative thinking, and collaboration. Escape Rooms demonstrate the power of games that intensify play through the situational narrative of escape as well as demanding that players inhabit a role; at the very least they play as themselves trying to escape the room, but escape rooms can do much more world building to push players to take on other types of roles. As such, our escape room scenario will particularly emphasize the conference theme of performance. CCCC 2018 featured an Escape Room game themed around composition, and this was so well-received by our community, we want to involve that format in our workshop.

Sources/References to consider:
• Jesse Schell, The Art of Game Design + deck of lenses
• Tracy Fullerton, Game Design Workshop
• Katherine Isbister, How Games Move Us: Emotion By Design
• Jennifer Grouling Cover, The Creation of Narrative in Tabletop Role-Playing Games
• Douglas Eyman and Andrea Davis, Play/Write: Digital Rhetoric, Writing, Games
• Amy M. Green, Storytelling in Video Games: The Art of the Digital Narrative
• Debra Hawhee, Bodily Arts: Rhetoric and Athletics in Ancient Greece
• Steve Holmes, The Rhetoric of Games as Embodied Practice: Procedural Habits
• Miguel Sicart, The Ethics of Computer Games
• Miguel Sicart, “Game, Player, Ethics: A Virtue Ethics Approach to Computer Games,” International Review of Information Ethics, 4, 13-18.
• Ian Bogost, Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Videogames
• Mary Flanagan, Critical Play

(W.06) Lights, Camera, Action: Performance and Performing in Writing Center Origins

Level: All

Cluster: Writing Programs

Abstract: This workshop reviews creating, building, founding, and/or redesigning Writing Centers. Bedford St Martins is providing lunch and the St. Martin’s Sourcebook for Writing Tutors for all workshop participants.

Full description:

ACT I. Vision/Missions (9:00-9:45)
Session Performers: Performer 3, Performer 5, Performer 10
Just as a movie director has a vision for a screenplay, we need a vision for our centers. When we build a brand-new writing center, or significantly re-vision an existing writing center, creators can use vision/mission statements to represent and name the work the center performs for the campus community. This section of the workshop will focus on working with vision/mission statements, using campus-based research to craft the statements, thinking through ways to focus these statements, problematizing these performances of vision/mission by reviewing sample statements, and crafting our own new (or re-visioned) statements.

ACT II. Space (9:50-10:35)
Session Performers: Performer 1, Performer 8
Whether it’s a one-act play or the latest Oscar winner, the setting of a performance has an immediate effect on the audience. It prepares us for how to approach a given situation. The same holds true for our writing center spaces. When building a writing center from the ground up, what sort of design/aesthetic choices need to be made? This section will discuss some of the conversations that need to be had in designing a new writing center, as well as bring in scholarship to support the idea of a welcoming space. Participants will be able to work together to brainstorm how best to design their writing center space, while also considering common roadblocks like budgetary constraints and administrative pushback.

ACT III. Budget (10:40-11:25)
Session Performers: Performer 1, Performer 3
Budget performances can be Oscar winning or Rotten Tomato worthy. In this section, we will conduct some impromptu performances of identifying budget topics. Then, we will ask co-star audience participants to imagine themselves in A Field of Their Dreams where drama and fantasy collide into Writing Center budget episodes. We will work together to identify budgetary needs and find solutions to meet those needs that at least qualify as worthy mentions. Audience participants will receive handouts and worksheets to assist in their future independent performances.

ACT IV. Outreach (11:30-12:15)
Session Performers: Performer 6, Performer 9, Performer 10
Performance-rhetoric allows writing centers to think about outreach as “making our relations” with others across and beyond our campus communities. In this workshop segment, participants will continue to work with their vision/mission statements, identifying campus and community partners and common initiatives. We will explore the collaborative roles of advisory boards, WAC initiatives, and regional and international organizations. Through these discovery performances, we will consider how collaborative roles can shape or reshape our values. Audience participants will receive contact information for their regional and national/international organizations.

****INTERMISSION (Lunch Break (12:15-12:45))****
Lunch is hosted by Bedford/St. Martin’s
includes a copy of The St. Martin’s Sourcebook for Writing Tutors

ACT V. Tutors (12:45-1:30)
Session Performers: Performer 4, Performer 5
To have a great show, directors need performers. In the Writing Center Community Theater, our main performers are our tutors. ACT V will review tutor roles, the talents that tutors bring to their roles in collaborative learning, and the advantages and disadvantages of working with undergraduate peer tutors, graduate students, and professional tutors. With an eye towards diversity in casting (hiring), engaging tutoring as performance and hiring as casting, we will roleplay with workshop participants.

ACT IV. Tutor Training: (1:35-3:30)
Performers: Performer 1, Performer 4, Performer 5, Performer 7
Any good production is supported by a cast of thousands. Performers in ACT IV will consider how we direct our resources and relationships to support tutor education and training. How can we leverage university partnerships. As with any script writing workshop, Performers and audience participants will discuss scripts that include climactic performances, such as: collaborative partnering between high school and university Writing Centers, options for initial training and for sustaining quality writing tutoring (with and without partners) and certification opportunities.

ACT VII. Assessment (3:35-4:45)
Session Performers: Performer 1, Performer 2, Performer 5
Engage and leverage your writing center data. Learning to perform the role of resource advocate for your center is often learned on the job for many writing center directors. Come participate in an interactive session that focuses on developing measurable learning outcomes, building annual reports that effectively tell your center’s story, and training tutors to create post session narratives that highlight the work they do in meaningful ways. Learning the dance of the annual report and how to choreograph your data moves you closer to the BIG TIME.

(W.07) Co-Exploring International Writing Research and Rehearsing Scholarly Performances

Sponsored by: International Researchers Consortium

Level: All

Cluster: Research

Abstract: Thirty-two writing scholars from 20 countries co-explore and rehearse in-process research projects and their complex cultural, political, and linguistic contexts.

Full description:

Our performances as writing scholars involve more than just composing and publishing research. We must also engage with diverse traditions, methods, and theories from around the globe. Complex cultural, political, and linguistic contexts often complicate these performances. That said, writing scholars rarely have an open space to “rehearse” with each other across these contexts. In this workshop, participants will enter dialogic conversations to give and receive rich feedback on their research and deeply reflect on higher education writing research from around the world. The design of this workshop also allows scholars to interact with audiences not always accessible during the writing process. Scholars studying writing in different languages are welcomed, especially those typically underrepresented in the field.

This workshop is made up of 32 writing researchers, who will be designated as workshop facilitators. In advance of the workshop, 27 of the facilitators will share works-in-progress with a brief explanation of theoretical, cultural, and linguistic contexts. Each facilitator and all additional registrants will read the works-in-progress and choose 5 before attending the workshop. Then each facilitator will lead a table discussion on their piece. All perspectives will be explored on equal footing with other “embodied performances” and potential audiences. The facilitator-participants will rehearse their current findings and questions, encounter many international perspectives, and perform as both agents and audiences throughout the day. Throughout the workshop, all participants will foster deep engagement with each other’s work and discuss various avenues for publication.

The projects represent new developments in writing studies from Bangladesh, Canada, China, Colombia, France, Germany, Ireland, Jordan, South Korea, KSA, Lebanon, Pakistan, Philippines, South Asia, Syria, Sweden, Scotland, UAE, UK, and US . The 21 projects and 32 writing researchers from diverse national, cross-national, disciplinary, and multilingual contexts form the heart of the workshop exchanges. In other words, these projects and how they interrelate throughout the day will be the content of this workshop. The workshop chairs will provide the framework for these discussions and guide them towards overall themes and future applications. Understanding how different methodologies “perform” in various projects will be a key focus. Some of the represented methodologies include genre theory, archival research, interviews and surveys with students and faculty in specific contexts, corpus analysis, microgenetic analysis of student writing, analysis of institutional policy documents, ethnographic approaches to disciplines, participatory action research, and digital tracking.
Workshop goals

The workshop includes 3 interactive activities, 2 to be completed before the CCCC.

First, by January, workshop facilitators post the following on a wiki (see http://compfaqs.org/CompFAQsInternational/InternationalWritingStudies):

-A draft research text, description of the rhetorical situation of the work, and glossary of context/culture-specific terms to be used at the workshop.
-A digest of key theorists and methods and rationale for their use.
-A “public” abstract of the project for non-expert audiences.

Second, the texts are grouped into 6 clusters of 3-4 projects on the wiki.

From January to March, workshop participants (facilitators and any additional registrants) choose a text from each cluster to read closely, freeing workshop time for real dialogue. A video chat event between January and the CCCC allows participants to get to know each other.

Third, all facilitators will join small group discussions at CCCC with each selected author/text across the day. When not leading their own group, facilitators become audiences for other registrants. Everyone encounters current, ongoing writing research, research questions, and emergent or well-established methods from several countries. Each project receives attentive and sustained discussion, as participants question assumptions, negotiate tensions and differences, and model practices that resist simple dichotomies. As the workshop progresses, facilitators will construct a collective sense of possible responses to the shared performances of the day.

Morning session
9:00-9:15 Introduction
9:15-10:00 Small-group discussions, 1st cluster of texts
10:00-10:15 Break
10:15-11:00 Small-group discussions, 2nd cluster
11:00-11:45 Small-group discussions, 3rd cluster
11:45-12:30 Whole-group discussion, sharing notes from clusters

Afternoon session
1:30-1:45 Review of the morning discussion.
1:45-2:30 Small-group discussions, 4th cluster
2:30-2:45 Break
2:45-3:30 Small-group discussions, 5th cluster
3:30-4:15 Small-group discussions, 6th cluster
4:15-5:00 Final discussion: How do we define performance in our research and how do we bring that research to new audiences?

Chairs’ Focus Questions
To engage with conference themes, the workshop chairs keep track of threads and look for connections with these questions:

How are different theories and methodologies embodied in specific cultural, linguistic, and social contexts?

What kinds of performances are available globally and across cultures?

What kinds of performances among different research subjects and stakeholders are hidden in the research we do?

How do local settings shape the teaching and research of writing?

How can international communities of writing scholars best perform together with the texts and contexts of higher education while working towards responsible mutual engagement?

How can we help each other disseminate our research in ways that can transform our performances in the broader field of writing research?

The workshop promises a deep collaborative performance across international contexts, engaging projects and people in sensitive, responsible, and productive ways.

(W.08) Developing an Indigenous Scholarly Practice: An Indigenous Rhetorics Research and Writing Retreat

Sponsored by: Caucus for American Indian Scholars and Scholarship

Level: All

Cluster: Research

Abstract: This workshop, sponsored by the Caucus for American Indian Scholars and Scholarship, is designed to introduce Indigenous theories, practices, and approaches to research and writing.

Full description:

Rationale:
The practice of Indigenous rhetorics (alphabetic, visual, digital, performative, oral, and material) is positioned at the meeting grounds between Rhetoric & Composition and American Indian studies. Scholars of Indigenous rhetorics are concerned with complicated questions about the relationships between power, history, knowledge-making, literacy, and language. As scholars of Indigenous rhetorics, decoloniality guides our research and writing as we seek to provide additional options to rhetorical production and are invested in decolonial movements. Indigenous rhetorics scholarship, research methodologies, and narrative approaches are ultimately used for decolonial and social justice work. In this full-day workshop, we will hold an Indigenous rhetorics writing and research retreat that will make space for those who are interested in learning more about Indigenous rhetorics and the narrative and methodological approaches related to Indigenous theories and worldviews. In many ways, this workshop responds to Vershawn A. Young’s acknowledgement that there is a dominant assumption that rhetoric is simply “words.” In this workshop, participants will understand how to develop an Indigenous rhetorics scholarly practice that is embodied, relational, rooted in the land, in practice, and ancestral.

Since we believe that our entire discipline can benefit from implementing Indigenous practices, approaches, and methodologies, we see this workshop as a “research retreat” where scholar-teachers from all backgrounds can learn about various forms of Indigenous knowledge-making, practice these forms of knowledge-making, and discuss ways to approach Indigenous forms of research in their teaching.

Focus:
This workshop, sponsored by the Caucus for American Indian Scholars and Scholarship, is designed to introduce key theories, practices, and orientations to Indigenous approaches to researching and writing.

The goals of this workshop are: 1) for participants to develop a deeper understanding of the possible roles that Indigenous rhetorics can play in their research, writing, and teaching through a series of presentations and hands-on activities focused on relational accountability, storying as methodology, rhetorical listening, and acknowledgement of embodied differences. 2) To support participants as they begin to develop and apply a foundation of Indigenous writing and research methodologies to use in their research and decolonial and social justice oriented pedagogy. 3) To discuss the ways that the stories we share develop our theoried worlds, weave together agents in diverse worldviews, and develop meaningful relationships that seek to sustain our knowledge-making communities through Indigenous rhetorical practices. 4) To frame performance-composition through Indigenous methodologies and epistemologies with/in embodied practices that are relational, responsible, and reflective.

We’ll accomplish these goals in three ways: 1) by providing intellectual contexts to anchor activities for the workshop; 2) by providing hands-on learning opportunities and activities for participants aimed directly at strategies for incorporating Indigenous text makings and practices that acknowledge embodiment as an important part of relational accountability for scholars working with/in Indigenous rhetorics; and 3) by modelling storying as methodology alongside rhetorical listening as important practices within Indigenous rhetorics. This learning-based workshop, then, focuses on the needs of our participants by providing them with opportunities to work with experienced scholars of Indigenous rhetorics. In addition, we’ll supply a wide array of resources for participants to develop ways they may want to incorporate these embodied practices responsibly into their research and pedagogy.

Activities/Sequence:
This full-day workshop begins the way that scholarship in Indigenous rhetorics begins with the history and language of the peoples on whose lands we’re located – the Indigenous peoples of Pennsylvania. This context is necessary in order to understand the work of Indigenous rhetorics as always already anchored in the cultures, beliefs, and worldviews lived in Indigenous spaces. During these 20-minute presentations, facilitators will provide crucial information for each topic and then invite participants to engage in the knowledge-making practice related to the topic or model.

Speaker 1 – Getting Started with Indigenous Rhetorics: Key Words and Concepts
Foundational to practicing Indigenous rhetorics is knowing and understanding key words and concepts associated with them. Drawing on the work of rhetoric, composition, education, and American Indian Studies scholars, workshop participants will work through naming, defining, and giving shape to terms and concepts through examples situated in historic and current Indigenous contexts. While not exhaustive, this substantive review lays groundwork for workshop sessions that follow.

Speaker 2 – Positionality and Orientations to Indigenous Forms of Research
Facilitators will discuss how our positionality/orientation to the Indigenous communities we work with reflects or challenges how research was historically conducted within Indigenous communities. By looking at how different writers identify their positionality/orientation and its influence on their research, we will explore how this affects our research, methodologies, and practices.

Speaker 3 – Understanding Community: Relational Accountability, Reciprocity, and Respect
Workshop participants will discuss the intricacies of building relationships with Indigenous communities (their rhetorics and ways of being) and will discuss how to implement various kinds of community-based research and methodologies, including research and classroom practice.

Speaker 4 – Cherokee Doubleweaving
In a move to bridge material rhetorics, stories, epistemologies, and methodologies, we will include a hands-on activity that will guide attendees as they create Cherokee double-walled baskets, specifically highlighting the embodied praxis of interdisciplinary scholarly and pedagogical conversations (Driskill, 2010) as a way to collaborate by disrupting colonial knowledge-making.

Speaker 5 – Story as Methodology
Presenters will provide multiple examples of what it looks like to build story as a methodology. We will ask participants to write a story about a research experience and then discuss how to use it in a publication as the theoretical framing.

Schedule:
History of Indigenous peoples of Pennsylvania, 8:00am-8:15am
Getting started with Indigenous rhetorics: key words and concepts 8:20am-8:40am
Activity: Getting started with Indigenous rhetorics: 8:45am-9:15am
Break: 9:20am-9:30am
Positionality and Orientations to Indigenous forms of research, 9:35am-9:55am
Activity: Positionality and Orientations to Indigenous forms of research, 10:00am-10:30am
Break, 10:35 am-10:45 am
Understanding community: relational accountability, reciprocity, and respect, 10:50am – 11:10am
Activity, Understanding community, 11:20am – 11:40am
Pre-lunch reflection, 11:45am-noon
Lunch: 12-1pm
Cherokee doubleweaving, 1:00pm-1:20pm
Activity, Cherokee doubleweaving , 1:25pm-2:00pm
Break: 2:00pm-2:15pm
Story as methodology. 2:20pm-2:40pm
Activity: Story as methodology, 2:45pm-3:15pm
Break: 3:15pm-3:30pm
Small group brainstorming and project development, 3:30pm-4:30pm
Closing and Reflection, 4:45pm-5:00pm

(W.09) Establishing a Community of Inquiry in Online Writing Courses through Student and Instructor Presence

Sponsored by: Online Writing Instruction Standing Group

Level: All

Cluster: Writing Pedagogies and Processes

Abstract: This workshop aids instructors in establishing a successful Community of Inquiry (CoI) within their online classes.

Full description:

In this workshop, we will help instructors establish a Community of Inquiry (CoI) within their online classes. The establishment of a CoI aids in the construction of deep and meaningful knowledge among all who participate in the communication practices of the community when the CoI is established through an interaction of three presences: teaching, social, and cognitive (Swan, Garrison, & Richardson, 2009). Instructors must establish their own presence while simultaneously encouraging students to be more present in the online medium; the combination of the two facilitates cognitive presence and deeper engagement and learning. A fourth element in the CoI framework, as posited by Akyol and Garrison (2011), is assessment insofar as the authors suggest that instructors need to focus on assessing student learning outcomes in order to understand the depth of learning that occurs with interactive and collaborative approaches to teaching online. Thus, we add the fourth element of assessment as a way for instructors to assess student learning through projects they create and in-depth reflections they write on course outcomes.

Much of the scholarship provides context for a CoI framework in online settings (Garrison, Anderson, and Archer 2010); to continue the conversation, we suggest that technology can enhance these four elements. Instructors can establish presence through screencapture feedback (Stannard 2007; Siegel, 2006), synchronous video (Cho & Tobias, 2016), and multimodal instructional tools (Bourelle, 2017; Rubin, Fernandes, & Avgerinou, 2013), designing the course in such a way that students are interacting with one another through the use of similar technological tools. However, this argument presupposes that instructors not only know how to scaffold the classroom and use technology appropriately, but to first know how to use the technology to develop such an approach and to then to assess student-created multimodal compositions. As such, this workshop focuses on: 1) helping instructors develop presence through technology, test-driving low-stakes software (Jing or Screencast-O-Matic); 2) helping students establish presence through using similar software in collaborative learning spaces; 3) engaging students with course content using technology to aid in collaborative exploration, inquiry, and reflection; and 4) assessment of student learning as evidenced in their multimodal projects as a way to support student learning and curricular redesign. Upon completion of the workshop, attendees will leave with concrete instructional tools and actionable items they can implement in their online classes.

The CoI Framework in Writing Studies: (Plenary, 15 minutes)

Our plenary speaker will introduce participants to the CoI Framework, describing how the framework has been researched and employed in online and blended learning contexts. She will reflect on the potential for using this framework as a heuristic for designing and assessing online writing courses, sharing data from previous and ongoing mixed methods studies that investigate the extent to which blended and online writing courses function as CoIs. She will conclude with a discussion of the relationship between instructional design and tool selection, inviting participants to share their own experiences with engaging students in technology-mediated learning environments.

Presentation 1: Instructor Presence (1 hour)
Arguably, the instructor’s presence is the greatest departure from the traditional classroom that online writing instruction (OWI) creates—a point emphasized by research that shows that instructor presence is the feature of asynchronous online education that students miss most. Therefore, online writing instructors often develop strategies to compensate for their absence, such as participating in discussion board assignments, posting videos of themselves, using synchronous video, and providing feedback in various ways, including multimedia, on student work. In this presentation, we will explain the importance of instructor presence and instructor absence by working with the participants to understand what we need to be present for and how we can help students learn in our absence.

Coffee Break: 15 minutes

Presentation 2: Student Presence (1 hour)
In this presentation, the facilitators will offer examples of how to provide opportunities for student presence in the digital environment, in addition to seeking input from participants about practices they have implemented to build student presence online. We will look to complicate the discussion, however, by considering the implications of building student presence, especially where that might involve audio/video/image created by the student, and/or where presence-building activities move students into less common LMS tools or outside of the LMS entirely. What are the implications for accessibility? For privacy? And how do we align student presence building with course objectives that perhaps make no mention of such activities?

Lunch Break 12-1:30

Presentation 3: Cognitive Presence (1 hour)
In this presentation, the facilitators will discuss how to engage students with course content using synchronous technology to aid in collaborative exploration, inquiry, and reflection. While much scholarship examines asynchronous communication, particularly the use of discussion forums in OWI (Cho & Tobias, 2016; Wright & Street, 2007), this presentation will focus on other technologies, particularly those that allow for synchronous communication to support cognitive presence (Rockinson-Szapkiw, Wendt, Whighting, & Nisbet, 2016). We will look at online courses delivered via synchronous video conference as well as an asynchronous online writing class that provides synchronous options (e.g., Zoom and Google Hangouts) for student-student interaction as well as student-instructor interaction.

Coffee Break: 15 minutes

Presentation 4: Assessment (1 hour)
In this presentation, the facilitators will talk through how to assess multimodal projects, reflections, and eportfolios in ways that support student learning and curricular design within the online CoI. We will showcase student projects and corresponding rubrics, leading the audience through a discussion of providing effective summative and formative feedback throughout the students’ composing process (Borton and Huot, 2009). We will also discuss how to assign and use reflection as a way to assess students’ projects, using Shipka’s (2011) Statements of Goals and Choices (SOGCs) as a framework. Lastly, we will discuss using White’s (2005) idea of in-depth reflections to guide students’ self-evaluation within eportfolios.

Reflection/Entire Group Discussion (30 minutes, 5-minute reflection/25-minute discussion)
In a final reflection with the entire group, we will discuss how attendees will enact what they learned in their own classes.

(W.10) Performing Rhetorical Activism: Latinxs in the Community and in the Academy

Sponsored by: NCTE/CCCC Latinx Caucus

Level: All

Cluster: Community, Civic & Public

Abstract: This workshop continues the Latinx Caucus’s tradition of cultivating critical dialogue between Latinx scholars of rhetoric, writing, and literacy and our activists in Pittsburgh.

Full description:

This workshop continues the Latinx Caucus’s tradition of cultivating critical dialogue between Latinx scholars of rhetoric, writing, and literacy (including allies) and our activist counterparts in the Convention’s host city. Individual members of the Caucus will each introduce a Latinx group or organization from the Pittsburgh community. Each will discuss and present its work, methods, and history. These discussions will be followed by conversations among all workshop participants–speakers and enrollees–on the following subjects:

Bridging gaps between academic and activist work.

Developing the existing intersections of academic and activist work.

Exploring possibilities for future interaction between the two.

Using scholarship, art, and protest in to counter the current administration’s attacks on Latinxs.

Devising pedagogies that empower students and educators in light of the acute political precarity of the current moment.

Local and area groups to whom our speakers will reach out to include in the workshop:

Cafe con Leche Latino Artists Residency Program in Pittsburgh

Casa San Jose

Latino Community Center Pittsburgh

Past workshops have included poetry and fiction readings by authors from the Houston-based publisher Arte Público, presentations and testimonials by DREAMER and DACA activists, and an interactive presentation by Portland-based graffiti artist Hector Hernandez. It is too soon to tell which of the above groups (and others) will be available to participate in the workshop. The groups that do end up on the program will largely determine the substance of the conversations. Caucus members—and others—who sign up for the workshop will seek first to listen, and only then to work collaboratively with the groups to address the issues listed above. Caucus members will also do mini-workshops/presentations on their research.

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